SCM News Bulletin Vol 2 - Issue 3 - October 2010

International Luncheons 2010

Parramatta

Athula Ginige had suggested recently that we resurrect the international luncheons which were a regular occurrence some years ago, so we made the Parramatta event the inaugural Building ER international luncheon. Staff members brought along a plate of food from their culture to showcase a wide range of culinary delights.

In addition the luncheon was:

  • A housewarming for staff who had recently moved from Building EC into the refurbished Building ER;
  • A welcome for Ante Prodan (new staff member), Joanne Curry (returning staff member) and Carmel Coady who recently relocated from Kingswood to Parramatta;
  • A Recognition of Service for Andrew Francis (10 years), Athula (10 years), Paul Davies (20 years), Hon Cheung (10 years), Kenan Matawie (10 years), Seyed Shahrestani (10 years), Richard Ollerton (20 years), Bobbie Stewart (20 years);
  • To celebrate Nabil Mansour’s permanent appointment as the Parramatta Campus Support Officer.

  • We were hoping to include a farewell for Steve Lack, but unfortunately Steve was unable to attend.

Campbelltown

The international luncheon at Campbelltown followed the same format as the Parramatta luncheon, with staff members bringing along a plate of food from their culture.  The kitchen table was heaving with a wonderful selection of meats, salads and nibblies.

Jim Basilakis made us laugh with his “Greek” offering – something very sweet and delicious from Michel’s Patisserie – very cultural ...

Miroslav worked tirelessly at the BBQ and encouraged us to try his Serbian evapii or evapi.

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Our School's Impressive Venue at UWS Open Day

By Su-Yin Jowett

This year’s UWS Open Day was held on Sunday 29 August at Parramatta campus from 10am to 3pm. With hundreds of brightly coloured balloons, food stalls, musical gigs and clowns, the campus came to life with its festival atmosphere for the thousands of high school kids and their families who attended.

At the School of Computing and Mathematics we had several stalls and displays set up for the entire day, making it one of the most impressive and attractive venues at Open Day. There were interactive games stalls including Tetris and Sudoku Puzzle competitions, a racing car game on a huge plasma screen, and even a jelly bean guessing game for the faint hearted.

We had two long rows of tables and chairs set up as course advising booths providing opportunities for one-on-one course advice for students wanting advice on career and study options. We were fortunate to have a display booth by Microsoft, and a stall with representatives from the Australian Computer Society Foundation who provided further information to prospective students about scholarships and work placements.

The energy in the room was electric with an interactive demonstration by Anton Bogdanovych, showing the future of interactive video games in his full body virtual suit. His recently developed basketball video game captivated the audience as he energetically moved around the floor showing how his own body movement could be directly translated onto the avatar movement on the video game seen on the big screen. It was amusing for everyone to stand back and try to work out how the full body motion capture actually worked.

The School had four presentations running throughout the day promoting our Bachelor of Information Communication and Technology, presented by Dr Ana Hol; Bachelor of Computer Science by Dr Yun Bai; and Mathematics courses by Dr Carmel Coady. A popular presentation was conducted by three of our third year students, Sahan Wimalasiri, Tim Hiatt and Jared Nagle, who gave potential students a taste of what university life is really like from a student's perspective. They spoke about their learning experiences in the Bachelor of Computer Science program, as well as their successful second place victory at the Microsoft Imagine Cup this year. Students were intrigued by the presentation, and at the end there was an open floor discussion giving students an opportunity to ask questions.

Open Day was certainly a fun-filled and educational day for all who attended. Many thanks to our School staff and volunteer students who worked tirelessly to represent the School of Computing and Mathematics and present our courses to the wider community!

Read the Head of School's message of thanks to staff and volunteers who assisted at the 2010 UWS Open Day.

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SCM September Graduates Once Again in the Spotlight

by Tracey Hanson

On Wednesday, 22 September 2010 at 2:30pm, the School of Computing and Mathematics students who were eligible to graduate from the University of Western Sydney attended Parramatta campus for the Spring 2010 round of graduations. Computing and Mathematics were joined in their ceremony by Nursing and Engineering.

Sixty three excited students graduated in front of family, friends and staff from the School. In attendance were Head of School Professor Simeon Simoff, Dr Ana Hol, Professor Athula Ginige and myself. For the first time, I had the pleasure of participating in the academic procession, enjoying the ceremony from a different perspective - that of an academic staff member sitting on the stage. However I would have to say I am most comfortable at the coal face interacting with the students. I prefer sending them up on the stage, neat and tidy in their gowns, and giving them words of encouragement as they battle their nerves in anticipation of their moment in the spotlight.

It will not be long before the April 2011 round of graduations is upon us, and I urge all staff to attend and participate in the ceremonies in some capacity as it really is such an important part of the students’ academic experience. I know first-hand that they really do enjoy having a familiar face in attendance to link them to the School, and what better way to encourage a positive experience at UWS than to be part of this important occasion.

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New Staff Apointment - the School of Computing and Mathematics is pleased to announce the appointment of a new lecturer at Parramatta Campus

We extend a warm welcome to Dr Jim Basilakis.
By Simeon Simoff

At the end of September Dr Jim Basilakis joined the School as a Senior Lecturer, with a focus in Medical/Health Informatics and Telehealth.

In terms of the strategic development of the Health Informatics in the School, Jim brings a most unusual and valuable combination of professional expertise and experience. His background is in Medicine (MB.BS.BSc(Med)), Engineering (Master of Biomedical Engineering) and Computing (GradDipCS) – all from UNSW. For the past 16 years, as a practicing medical doctor, Jim has developed an intimate knowledge of the tertiary health care industry and its work practices in most clinical areas. This experience has extended in the last 10 years into the primary care sector through a Medical Director role for an innovative telehealth company TeleMedCare Pty Ltd, where he was responsible for the clinical and software design of telehealth products, including the deployment and integration of decision support systems in the healthcare sector. Since 2001 he has been also a Senior Research Fellow in the Biomedical Systems Laboratory at UNSW.

He is author and co-author of 30 research publications including articles, reports, conference proceedings and book chapters in the area of Health Informatics and Telehealth. He is the technical architect for the recently successful three-year $1.9 million ARC Linkage grant (2008-2011) “Design of an electronic guideline-driven decision support framework for home and community telehealth settings”. Dr. Basilakis is a member of the prestigious Australian Standards IT-014-012 Telehealth Subcommittee of the Australian Standards Association and has made a national contribution through participation in numerous NeHTA sponsored workshops.

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A Health Informatics Congress at the Cape of South Africa

By Heidi Bjering

MedInfo 2010 was held in Cape Town, South Africa from 12-15 September. This was the 13th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, an event that is held only once every three years. The congress was held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, with more than 1000 delegates from 75 different countries attending. There were several delegates from Australia, and from our School of Computing and Mathematics Professor Anthony Maeder and I attended.

The theme for MedInfo 2010 was "Partnerships for effective e-Health solutions", and with 9-10 parallel sessions running, it was often difficult to decide which sessions to attend! There were discussions on experiences of using eHealth to nurture patient empowerment, eHealth (global) interoperability and the use of terminologies in electronic health records, national electronic health record initiatives and experiences, social networking and use of virtual reality in health informatics, the role of health informatics in patient safety, monitoring and surveillance, and much more.

Before the official opening of the congress, I attended two pre-congress tutorials/workshops; a half-day tutorial on HL7 and a great full day tutorial/workshop on openEHR. During the congress Electronic Health Records were discussed in several sessions, and there was quite a bit of attention to openEHR – something I am keen to learn more about. The congress and the pre-congress tutorials provided me with a fantastic but very intense learning experience! 

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SCM Participates in the Annual Australian Mathematical Society Meetings

By Andrew Francis

This year the Australian Mathematical Society annual meetings were held in Brisbane at the University of Queensland campus in St Lucia, located on a magnificent 114-hectare site in a bend of the Brisbane River and considered by many to be Australia's most attractive campus.

These meetings are a busy hive of 20 parallel sessions on topics from algebra and number theory to computational mathematics to stochastic processes and modelling, and last four days.  This year about 400 mathematicians took part in the meetings, which include the Society's AGM.

UWS has frequently had staff participating in these meetings, highlighted last year when Dr Steve Lack from UWS won the prestigious Australian Mathematical Society Medal. This had a significant effect on the profile of UWS in the mathematics community.

This year several UWS staff participated: Dr Carmel Coady (Mathematics Education session), Associate Professor Andrew Francis (Algebra and Number Theory), and Dr Leanne Rylands (Combinatorics as well as Mathematics Education).  Andrew also chaired the selection panel for the BH Neumann Prize, awarded to the best talk by a PhD student at the conference, for the second year.

Next year the conference will be held closer to home, in Wollongong.  It is a great opportunity to meet other people in your research area, and listen to talks on the latest developments by Australia-based mathematicians as well as by a range of international keynote speakers. 

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Anton Bogdanovych's Artificial Intelligence Research

Dr Anton Bogdanovych is conducting research which is concerned with the future of video games, full body interactivity and artificial intelligence.

Dr Anton Bogdanovych, from the School of Computing and Mathematics, is conducting research which is concerned with the following three areas:

  • The future of video games. This research investigates using full body motion capture for controlling a video game environment.
  • Full body interactivity in Human-Computer Interaction.
  • Using Virtual Worlds and Artificial Intelligence for preserving cultures and teaching history to future students.

 Anton explains:

"My research shows the very nature of IT, which can be summarized as "Start here – go anywhere". It truly is a unique discipline that can only exist in a tight overlap with other fields. If you happen to develop a passion for other disciplines, like History and Cultural Studies in my case, your IT degree will give you the opportunity to make an active and innovative contribution to those areas... a contribution that other researchers in this discipline are unable to make. So keep your eyes open to such opportunities and use every chance to explore your passions. Only by finding a way to improve the quality of research in other disciplines will you unleash the true power of your IT degree."

Please view Anton’s motion capture demonstration at Capturing Basketball Moves with XSENSE MVN (opens in a new window).

Anton comments on the demonstration:

"The future of interactive video games is most definitely going to be shaped by full body motion capture.

At last, you will have to stand up from your couch and do some proper exercise. The skills you learn in the game will not be wasted, but can be directly applied in the real world... and now everybody who has some basic programming skills and understands physics can become a game developer.

In this demonstration I show how we use motion capturing for developing the basketball video game in the virtual world of Second Life. There is no need to use any control devices, the experience (which is proper multiuser 3D) is fully controlled by every part of your body. The body movement is directly translated onto the avatar movement and interactions with the ball are supported through recognising whether the user is holding, dribbling or throwing the ball based on the physical characteristics of the corresponding body parts.

The hardware we use is millimetre precise and is capable of delay-free real time interaction (the slow speed of some of the close-up footage in the demo is due to screen capturing software, not because of our system)."

Comments and related videos:

The City of Uruk 3000BC

Uruk is a joint research project between the University of Western Sydney and the Federation of American Scientists. The aim of the project is to recreate the ancient city of Uruk from the period around 3000BC in the Virtual World of Second Life, letting history students experience how it looked and how its citizens behaved in the past. Avatars “live” in the Virtual World of Second Life and re-enact the typical daily activities of the ancient people. In its current form the city features four agents populating two buildings. The ultimate goal is to have all the buildings in the city populated by virtual humans by 2011.

Something about the Uruk Project and a link to the video.

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