SCM News Bulletin Vol 3 - Issue 1 - January 2011
- SCM Research Students won the Best Student Paper Award at AI 2010
- John MacFarlane presents at the Profitable Sustainability in Property Conference, Sydney
- Best Paper Award at the 2010 British Academy of Management (BAM) conference
- New Staff Appointments
SCM Research Students won the Best Student Paper Award at AI 2010
Submitted by Dongmo Zhang
The paper "Maximal Matching for Double Auction" written by Dengji Zhao, Dongmo Zhang, MD Khan and Laurent Perrusel won the Best Student Paper Award at the 23rd Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2010) in Adelaide. The paper presents a matching algorithm of double auctions, which was used in the Jackaroo trading agent system. The Jackaroo trading agent system had also achieved second place (for the second year in a row) in the 2010 International Trading Agent Competition Market Mechanism Game held in Cambridge, Massachusetts USA. The UWS members who attended last year’s competition were Dr Dongmo Zhang, Dengji Zhao, Md Khan, Zhaowan Chen, Wei Huang, Dr Yan Zhang and Laurent Perrussel.
The Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence is the most important annual event on AI in Australasia and one of the prestige international AI conferences. Only one best non-student paper and one best student paper were awarded in last year. Dengji Zhao (PhD student) and Md Khan (Master Honours) are SCM research students supervised by Dongmo Zhang.
(From left to right) Zhaowan Chen, Md Khan, Dongmo Zhang, Yan Zhang and Dengji Zhao
John MacFarlane presents at the Profitable Sustainability in Property Conference, Sydney
John MacFarlane together with Dr Nils Kok from UC, Berkley and Maastricht University Netherlands (by video link) presented one of the keynote addresses:
Doing Well by Doing Good – a study of comparative returns for Green Buildings in Australia at the Profitable Sustainability in Property Conference conducted by the Australian Property Institute and the Australian Direct Property Investment Association in Sydney in November 2010. This conference was held for the second year running.
In this one day event participants looked at the legislators and policy impacts on sustainability in the property sector, here and overseas, some real examples of returns in greening a portfolio, and questioned the market on what the best approach to sustainability is in the industry.
Dr Kok reported on the findings of a study of green office buildings in the USA while John MacFarlane reported on the initial findings of a similar study he, together with Professor Graeme Newell from the School of Economics and Finance, are currently undertaking in Australia.
Best Paper Award at the 2010 British Academy of Management (BAM) Conference
Dr Kenan Matawie’s PhD student Kumaraguru Mahadevan presented an oral paper recently at the British Academy of Management (BAM) conference 14-16 September 2010 at the University of Sheffield, England. The paper was a collaboration between Kenan, Kumar and Dr Premaratne Samaranayake. The paper received an award for Best Paper.
Kumar is undertaking a PhD at the Centre for Industry and Innovation Studies (CInIS) in the College of Business, and Prem is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management.
Additionally two other papers of Kenan’s have recently been published in two journals:
Matawie K, Assaf A, 2010, Bayesian and DEA efficiency modelling: an application to hospital foodservice operations, Applied Statistics, vol 37, no. 6, pp 945-953
Matawie K, Assaf A, 2010, Improving the accuracy of DEA efficiency analysis: a bootstrap application to the health care foodservice industry, Applied Economics, vol 42, no. 27, pp 3547-3558
New Staff Appointments
Dr JamesEast
By Simeon Simoff
Dr James East has joined the School in the first week of February as a Lecturer in Pure Mathematics. He comes from the University of Sydney, where he received the University Medal in Pure Mathematics for his performance in the BSc (Advanced Mathematics) and the T.G. Room Medal for outstanding PhD thesis in Pure Mathematics for his thesis “On Monoids Related to Braid Groups and Transformation Semigroups”. Following the award of the PhD he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by La Trobe University, which he held for two years during 2006–2007. From the beginning of 2008 until February 2011 he has been a University of Sydney Postdoctoral Research Fellow. During these years his research projects have covered a wide range of topics in algebra and have led to more than 20 research articles, includingarticles in Advances in Mathematics, Journal of Algebra, International Journal of Algebra and Computation, and Communications in Algebra. His research areas include braid groups and monoids; transformation semigroups and related structures such as partition algebras; factorizable inverse monoids and coset monoids; Coxeter groups and reflection monoids; and representations of semigroups and algebras. You can get a much better first hand information in layman terms if you visit him in ER.G.18 on the Parramatta Campus.
Dr Anton Bogdanovych
By Simeon Simoff
Dr Anton Bogdanovych has re-joined the School, this time as a Lecturer in Entertainment Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, since he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School – many of you may have seen walking with a funny suit with wires pulling out of it – though visibly was in the building his real presence was in one of his beloved virtual worlds, injecting some intelligence into the software bots populating them. His Master student received the Best Paper award at the 2011 Australasian Computer Science Conference for the paper “Enhancing the Believability of Embodied Conversational Agents through Environment-, Self- and Interaction-Awareness”. If you are bored and want to cross the boundary between physical and virtual, have a real dance at a virtual disco somewhere o the Globe, and meantime pick some know-how on practical AI, just pop-in ER.1.14 on the the Parramatta Campus.
Dr Yi Zhou
By Simeon Simoff
Dr Yi Zhou has re-joined the School, this time as aLecturer in Foundation Artificial Intelligence, in late February and entered the semester with his teaching enthusiasm straight with coordinating and lecturing of the postgraduate unit "Content Management and Web Analytics." He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory, University of Western Sydney. When he may have been somewhat less known at the other School locations from the quiet rooms of the ISL High Tech Research Centre in Emu Plains, he has an impressive research record in a number of areas of foundation artificial intelligence combined with applications in software engineering, information security and in Web technologies. "In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. … Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of the civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make." [Douglas Rushkoff, "Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age"]...and as a lot of this reality is coming from AI, it's worth picking up some smart tips from Yi at Y.3.45 on the Kingswood Campus.
Ruby Liu
By Susan Henley
Ruby joined us on Monday 7th March and will be working alongside Veena as part of the Parramatta admin team. Ruby has experience in Student Services and Admissions, previously working at Charles Sturt University, Victoria University and Raffles College of Design and Commerce. We are already reaping the benefits of Ruby’s knowledge and familiarity with university processes, as she has adapted quickly to her new environment. Welcome Ruby.
