SCM News Bulletin Vol 3 - Issue 2 - April 2011
- 3rd place in the prestigious international Artificial Intelligence contest Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge 2011 held in Orlando, Florida, USA
- Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards at the Australian Computer Science Conference 2011
- Gold at the 2011 National Masters Athletics Championships, Brisbane
Dr Glenn Stone
By Simeon Simoff
Dr Glenn Stone joined the School just after Easter as an Associate Professor in Statistics, leaving his position of Senior Research Statistician in CSIRO Mathematical 
and Information Sciences. He brings to the School a mixture of scholarly and industry experience.
For a few years in the early 1990s he was a Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Bath in the UK, where he did statistical research, consulting and teaching both at an undergraduate and Masters level, and research student supervision. Courses taught ranged from Multivariate Statistics and Experimental Design to Statistical Programming and Computer Intensive Statistical Methods. Through the 90s until now he has been in different research leadership roles in CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, in the area of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. During 1999 – 2003 Glenn has also been a Principal Research Analyst at Insurance Australia Group (previously NRMA Insurance Group Limited). He has co-supervised PhD students in UNSW, Macquarie University and University of Queensland. Glenn has been an Associate Editor of Statistics and Computing and a Chairman of the Statistical Computing Section of SSAI.
If you are interested in “commercial strength” expertise in statistical programming and computing, including SAS programming, R and S-Plus, as well as data mining and analytics with the major analytics tools, you can get more detailed first-hand information if you visit Glenn in ER.G.19 on the Parramatta Campus.
3rd place in the prestigious international Artificial Intelligence contest Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge 2011 held in Orlando, Florida, USA
By Anton Bogdanovych
The winners of the second annual Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge (FVWC) at the 2011 Defense GameTech Users' Conference have been announced. The goal of the open and global challenge is to discover innovative and interactive applications implemented in a virtual environment. The annual event is led by the US Army Research Laboratory's, Simulation and Training Technology Center. Entry criteria are intentionally unbound to encourage creative results. This year the focus was on artificial intelligence.
Third place in the Patterns of Life Category was won by Dr Anton Bogdanovych, Lecturer with the School of Computing and Mathematics, with his entry “Uruk: The First City”.
For more information, please see The City of Uruk 3000BC (opens in a new window)
Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards at the Australian Computer Science Conference 2011
By Anton Bogdanovych
The Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW) is a CORE (Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia) event that has taken place every year since 1978.
A paper authored by Kiran Ijaz (UTS), Anton Bogdanovych and Simeon Simoff: "Enhancing the Believability of Embodied Conversational Agents through Environment-, Self- and Interaction-Awareness" won both Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards at the Australian Computer Science Conference 2011
For a PDF version of the paper, please see Enhancing the Believability of Embodied Conversational Agents through Environment-, Self- and Interaction-Awareness (opens in a new window)
Gold at the 2011 National Masters Athletics Championships, Brisbane
By Mark Johnston
Representing NSW, Mark Johnston, Lecturer in the School of Computing and Mathematics, entered the National Masters Athletics Championships held in Brisbane over Easter. He entered three events - the hammer throw, discus throw and shot put in the Men’s 55 year age group and won the gold medal in hammer and discus events. Both events were closely fought, exciting contests with Mark winning the hammer on the final throw of the competition by just 8cm, 38.92 metres to 38.86m. All three place-getters were within one metre of each other. In the discus Mark won by 40cm and again all three place-getters were within one metre of each other. The last round was exciting again with any of the top three competitors able to win, however the second and third place-getters both fouled their throws, leaving Mark with the win.
This followed Mark’s win in the discus at last year’s National Championships and a bronze medal in the same event at the World Masters Games in Sydney in 2009.
