CSI June 2008 Newsletter

Welcome to this occasional newsletter from the CSI team. We have been pretty busy recently and felt a newsletter was the appropriate way to highlight some of  our achievements and opportunities coming up. We hope you find it of interest.

John Hosking
Director Centre for Software Innovation
Email: john@cs.auckland.ac.nz Mobile: 021 565300

Changes to Centre Management and New Website

John Corey, the Centre's foundation director, has recently stepped down from this role. Professor John Hosking has taken over as Centre Director, with Professor John Grundy as Deputy Director. John Corey is continuing in a part time role with the Centre as a consultant. Nick Jones, the centre's project manager, has recently taken on a joint appointment with the Centre for eResearch bridging the gap between these two important centres of expertise (see below). To mark these changes, we have substantially overhauled our website to provide easier and more intuitive access to information about our programmes, services and activities. Many thanks to Lee-Yan Marquez at Argent of Change for  the new clean design and Jun and Nick from our Centre for the technical implementation.

Extenda Programme

After a successful pilot in 2007, our 2008 Extenda programme will commence soon. If you are a SME ICT Company focused on developing innovative software based products, Extenda will be of interest. The programme, developed by CSI and the Auckland Business School, will provide you with the understanding and tools you need to exploit research activity in your business. You will be given the opportunity to improve your research capabilities, research planning methodologies and enhance your products making you better placed to compete nationally and internationally. We now seeking companies to take part in our Extenda programme. If you are interested please visit our Extenda web page and complete the registration of interest form.

Academy Programme

A reminder that we will soon be looking for companies to take part in our CSI Academy summer internship programme. The Academy offers a managed Internship programme, bringing together ICT students, academics and industry practitioners. It offers organisations the equivalent of a term-length student internship, in which students gain exposure to an applied culture and environment outside of the classroom. If you are interested in participating please visit our Academy web page and complete the registration of interest form.

SPPI Programme

The aim of our FRST funded Software Process and Product Improvement project is to develop and apply a range of software productivity techniques and tools to enhance the performance of the New Zealand software industry. This six University project, led by CSI, has had substantial industry uptake. More than 20 companies and organisations have partnered with us to apply our research results into industrial practice. For more information SPPI visit our SPPI web page and wiki pages. We are keen to partner with more companies so please contact us if you would like to learn more.

Health Bots Programme

A CSI team, led by Dr Bruce MacDonald, has secured $1.8m funding for a collaborative project with ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) Korea and a range of industry partners to provide robotic based day-to-day services for the aged and disabled. Ministers Cunliffe and Hodgson recently announced the funding, with Minister Cunliffe stating that ”The Centre is a tribute to the efforts of the University’s researchers, Auckland UniServices and government officials”. The technologies and expertise of ETRI and the UofA bring unique capabilities to a new partnership for research into this vital and pressing area of population health. Dr MacDonald has recently given an address on the project to the KANZ Broadband Summit in Seoul. The Centre is looking for NZ industry partners and collaborators in this project so please contact Bruce if you are interested via the HealthBots web site.

New Usability Lab and Microsoft Research Funding

Centre researchers Dr Beryl Plimmer and Dr Gerald Weber have recently acquired a range of usability evaluation equipment including an eye tracker. This equipment has been consolidated into a usability lab, which is available on a fee for use basis for industrial users. If you are interested in finding out more about this facility, please contact John Hosking. Beryl, together with Professor John Grundy, has also recently obtained a research grant from Microsoft Research Asia to support a project on Dividing Text and Drawing Ink in sketch based interfaces.

CSI wins Atlassian Codegeist Competition for Jira Plugin

A CSI team has recently won the Jira category of the Atlassian Codegeist competition. The Jira Schema Configurator plugin was developed by Sharvin Ragavan, a student of Computer Science at The University of Auckland, during the CSI Academy summer programme of 2007/2008, supervised by Professor John Hosking, with functional and interaction design by Nick Jones, and support from Jun Huh and Yuriy Halytskyy. Codegeist is an annual plugin competition organised by Atlassian, giving prizes to the best plugin for each of Atlassian's products.  The judges are the developers of Atlassian products themselves, and they have suggested that they would recommend Sharvin's plugin to their support team as a diagnostic tool.

Google TechTalk on The Visual Wiki

Centre Director John Hosking recently gave a Google TechTalk on his research with PhD student Christian Hirsch. The talk focussed on the concept of a "Visual Wiki", which combines the notion of a textual and a visual representation of knowledge. A Visual Wiki model provides a unified framework to design and discuss different approaches and three prototype Visual Wikis have demonstrated usefulness of the model. The talk is available on YouTube and Thinkbase, one of the example visual wikis, is publically available.

Centre Manages BuildIT Programme

CSI is project managing the Tertiary Education Commission funded BuildIT programme. BuildIT's task is to grow and strengthen the ICT research community in New Zealand helping to develop young and emerging researchers to provide a solid basis for the future of ICT research. Running for 3 years it comprises a range of contestable funding opportunities, postdocs, PhD scholarships, and travel funding, aimed at developing PBRF recognised strengths in ICT. Contact programme leader Associate Prof Robert Amor if you are interested in this programme.

BeSTGRID Project Completion and Centre for eResearch Establishment

BeSTGRID started in 2006 as a Tertiary Education Commission funded Project. It focused on how to make eResearch work by creating a fully-functional New Zealand eResearch ecosystem for New Zealand. CSI provided project management expertise for the project. The project formally completed in March this year having delivered mechanisms, methods and tools that facilitate collaboration on shared information, sharing of computational resources and online visualization of instruments and online visualization of instruments and experiments. Since formal completion, BeSTGRID has continued as a collegial community providing leadership and coordination in establishingt and maintaining research infrastructure in New Zealand. The University of Auckland has recently established a Centre for Research (CERES)  with our very own Nick Jones as Manager. For more information on CERES and it's activities, contact Nick.

Major Computing Conferences Coming to Auckland

Two major conferences have been attracted to Auckland by Centre members and affiliates.

The 34th Very Large Data Bases Conference (VLDB'08)  will be held in Auckland 23-28th August this year, with Associate Professor Gill Dobbie as General Chair. VLDB is a premier annual international forum for database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. The conference will feature research talks, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops. It will cover current issues in database and information systems research.

The 24th IEEE/ACM Automated Software Engineering Conference will be held in Auckland in November 2009. Professor John Grundy, CSI Deputy Director, is general Chair. The conference brings together researchers and practitioners to share ideas on the foundations, techniques, tools, and applications of automated software engineering.