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Research Strengths

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Brief research profiles for members of the Department of Software Engineering and links to their home pages

Areas
Academic Staff
Research Associates

Object Technology

Brian Henderson-Sellers
Robert Rist

Requirements Engineering

Didar Zowghi
Ban Al-Ani

Systems Integration

George Feuerlicht

Database

George Feuerlicht
Jie Lu
Pramod Singh

Enterprise Systems Design and Development

George Feuerlicht
Jie Lu
Richard Raban

Knowledge-Based Systems

John Debenham
Raymond Lister
Jie Lu
Simeon Simoff
Didar Zowghi

Data Mining

Paul Kennedy
Raymond Lister
Simeon Simoff

Multiagent Systems

John Debenham
Simeon Simoff
Alan Lin

High Performance Computing

Jenny Edwards
Barry Jay
Gabi Keller
Helen Lu

Carolyn McGregor

Neural Networks and Machine Learning

Paul Kennedy
Brian Lederer
Simeon Simoff

Computer Graphics and Animation

Kevin Suffern

Ron Balsys
Don Herbison-Evans

Cognitive Aspects of Software Design

Robert Rist

Head of Department

Richard Raban

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Head of Department & Senior Lecturer

In general, my research interests are in information systems modelling in the context of systems integration using Internet technologies. I work on applying Knowledge Representation formalisms like Conceptual Graphs and Description Logics for describing data and information services. Also, I develop ontologies for formalising domain semantics. In this work I use Conceptual Graphs, Description Logics, UML, XML, XML Schema, RDF, Java and OIL.

Academic Staff (in alphabetical order)

Ban Al-Ani

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Lecturer

John Debenham

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Professor of Computer Science

Main research areas: knowledge-based systems, multiagent systems and negotiation. Work on knowledge-based systems has focussed on maintainable knowledge representations. Work on multiagent systems has focussed on heavy duty (three-layer, BDI hybrid) agents for high-level business process management. Negotiation is a new area that spans inter-agent negotiation and electronic negotiation in e-business applications.

Jenny Edwards

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Associate Professor

My interests are parallel algorithms and computation for large numeric problems, particularly large scale and integer mathematical programming and their practical applications. I am also interested in social and educational issues in computing. I have supervised research theses in all of the above and a variety of decision support areas related to them.

George Feuerlicht

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Senior Lecturer

My research interests are in applied database research, more recently focusing on the investigation of methods for data and application integration. The research topics include the investigation of techniques for management and integration of semi-structured data, architectures for integration of enterprise and e-business applications, and XML databases and query languages. I have published over 30 research papers on topics including distributed databases, object-relational databases, expert database systems, computer security, and architectures for integration of heterogeneous applications.

Brian Henderson-Sellers

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Professor of Information Systems

Brian Henderson-Sellers has research interests in object-oriented processes and OO metrics. He is author of numerous papers on these topics including nine books on object technology. He is co-founder and leader of the international OPEN Consortium. Brian's current research projects include OO modelling (particularly aggregation in UML and OML), OO Process, organizational transition to OO, OO metrics, OO ontologies and component-based development.

John Hughes

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Professor of Computing

Barry Jay

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Associate Professor & Associate Dean (Research, Policy and Planning)

My current research captures properties common to all data structures, such as support for equality and mapping, which are not shared by more complex objects, like functions or programs. These properties are formalised in the constructor (lambda-)calculus and functorial type system. They underpin the development of the new programming language FISh2 which combines high expressive power with high performance.

Gabrielle Keller

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Lecturer

My research interests currently are the compilation of programming languages, in particular for high performance computing. Other areas of interest include the practical applications of program transformation and type theory for efficient compilation, distributed and parallel computing, parallel algorithms, functional programming and cluster computing.

Paul Kennedy

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Lecturer

I am interested in the application and development of biological metaphors to computing. This includes areas such as evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, complex adaptive systems, artificial immune systems and artificial life. At the moment I am looking at a double stranded encoding model for use in genetic algorithms and I am becoming more interested in time coded neural networks.

Brian Lederer

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Lecturer

I am interested in neural networks, quantum computation, and peer learning. In one neural network project we seem have gotten good classification performance on breast cancer data with small training sets. In another project, where I am supervising a PhD student, we are looking at synfire chains as a mechanism for explaining how the brain binds features together to form objects.

Raymond Lister

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Senior Lecturer

I have a history of data mining using both Knowledge-Based Systems and Neural Networks. I apply existing algorithms to worthwhile problems, especially medical applications. Recently, I have become increasingly interested in research into computer education, on two fronts. First, the evaluation and development of computer education in the light of pedagogical theory. Second, the pedogically sound application of new "learning technologies".

Helen Lu

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Associate Lecturer

Helen Lu is a PhD student in the Faculty of Engineering (electrical). The project she has almost completed is about modelling of high frequency transformers used in power electronic systems for numerical simulation purpose. Her new research interests are in high performance computing, specially in the cluster computing for large scale engineering problems and expert systems with emphasis on optimum design of electromagnetic components.

Jie Lu

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Lecturer

Main research areas: Decision Support Systems(DSS) and Electronic Commence(EC). Work on DSS has focussed on knowledge-based DSS(KBDSS), group DSS(GDSS), multi-objective DSS(MODSS), and their integration. A new framework and prototype of knowledge-based multi-objective group decision support systems have been developed. Work on EC has focussed on EC application development modeling and assessment. A relevant research grant has been completed.

Robert Rist

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Senior Lecturer

My core research interest is the process of human software design, especially novice design and the creation of programming knowledge. Early on, I carried out empirical studies of how procedural and object-oriented (OO) programmers actually do their design and coding. I then applied the insights from this research to my teaching, to give new programmers an explicit model of design and explicit measures of the elegance of an OO solution. In the last few years I have designed and built a new cognitive architecture to capture the semantic and episodic structures used during software design.

Simeon Simoff

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Senior Lecturer

Broad interdisciplinary research interests, including (but not limited to):

  • Multimedia, where the work is focussed on integrated data mining of multimedia cases (text, image, video, audio and CAD data analysis of a multimedia case as a data unit);
  • Virtual worlds in professional and educational practices, where the focus is on the information organisation, object representation and intelligent support of human activities;
  • Information visualisation, where current work is focused on supporting human creativity for knowledge discovery in data and information sources, and representing data mining results in compact and interpretable form.

Pramod Singh

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Lecturer

My main area of research is on Multimedia Databases and Information System, especially applied to Medical and Bio-informatics. The current work focused on extraction and segmentation of information from medical image and video data using image processing techniques and proposing data models and query languages for distributed multimedia information system. The other areas of my research interest includes Distributed & Cluster Computing, Decision Support Systems for Distributed and Group Decisions, Internet & e-Commerce Applications, Data mining and Data warehousing.

Kevin Suffern

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Senior Lecturer

My research interests are in computer graphics, in particular ray tracing and implicit surface visualisation. I have written a ray tracer to help my computer graphics teaching and research. Recent research work includes a new algorithm for ray tracing parametric surface patches that is simple enough to teach to undergraduate students. I also use ray tracing to create computer art.

Didar Zowghi

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Senior Lecturer

Didar Zowghi's specific research focus is in developing automated support for Requirements Engineering (RE) activities while maintaining the consistency of requirements models. Another current research project is an empirical investigation into requirements volatility during software development. Didar is also doing research in RE metrics and RE for web-based systems. Prior to becoming a full-time academic, Didar worked in IT industry both in UK and Australia as a senior consultant for several years. She is currently conducting consultancy projects on RE process improvement for several companies in Sydney.

Research Associates (in alphabetical order)

Ron Balsys

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PhD Student

My research interests are in visualisation of implicit surfaces using octree space subdivision, interval arithmetic for surface detection, using adaptive subdivision for efficient polygonal modelling. I also have an interest in visualisation using ray tracing. Other interests are in the uses of virtual reality systems and in solid state ionics.

Don Herbison-Evans

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Honorary Associate

Don’s interests are in computer graphics and animation, particularly of human movement, and especially of Dance. Over many centuries, Dance has developed sophisticated languages for describing human movement, and a natural development would be to provide “interpreters” for these, which can show a computer animation of a sequence of human movements described this way. Building an “interpreter” raises many problems.ergonomics.

Tuomas Klemola

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PhD Student

Alan Lin

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PhD Student

I plan to complete my PhD study in November of 2001. My current research interests include a multi-agent approach to support eCommerce, Business process management, and Global Enterprises. I am exploring multiagent interaction strategies to improve the performance of agents in a multiagent system for achieving their common goals.

Carolyn McGregor

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PhD Student

Narongdech Ruttananontsatean

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PhD Student

Magdy Serour

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PhD Student