If you’re interested in speech, language or sonics you should consider joining HCSNet, the Australian Research Council Research Network in Human Communication Science.

HCSNet aims to bring together researchers and students through workshops, conferences, and a variety of collaboration schemes in order to explore the boundaries of disciplines that encompass human communication. As a guide, this includes fields as diverse as psychology, computing, linguistics, engineering, philosophy and music.

Being a participant gives you access to an increasing number of funding programs (including funding for running interdisciplinary workshops and seminars) and events that are run under the auspices of the network. There’s some really good stuff coming up, including the NICTA/HCSNet MultiModel User Interaction Workshop (free registration thanks to HCSNet funding!), so join up and you’ll get the weekly HCSNet newsletter that will keep you informed …

I’ve spent the past two days at the inaugural CSIRO Scientific Development Forum (CSIRO access only, sorry people!), a gathering of early-career scientists and post-doctoral fellows from across CSIRO’s many diverse research areas. The focus was on providing insight and tools to help us develop as the future leaders of science in CSIRO and the local and international community.

Much of the two days was spent in discussions about our various diverse research areas. This was fascinating, given the breadth of our interests – spanning everything from molecular science, genetics, food technology, animal cloning, virology, astrophysics, precision optics and superconductor physics, petroleum research, ICT research, statistics, nutrition and a bunch of other areas. Despite such breadth, there were many interesting insights shared about how to take control of our own careers and personal development.

In addition, we heard from several high-profile speakers, including Federation Fellow Professor Calum Drummond, who talked about his career. One thing I certainly took away from his talk, apart from his “can-do” attitude, was his emphasis on the importance of balancing focus on work with family life. Dr David Mitchell spoke about entrepreneurship and his experience in several start-up companies. We also workshopped and brainstormed some interesting ideas around identifying business ideas that might satisfy existing market gaps and market needs across a range of industries.

All-in-all, it was a valuable 2 days, not least for the networking opportunities to meet and kindle relationships with a very diverse range of highly intelligent and highly motivated people.

A fantastic opportunity for an experienced Java Developer. We’re seeking a new software engineer to join our small team of engineers and scientists and be responsible for implementing world-leading research ideas in software.

You can find out more about our work or about the CSIRO ICT Centre here.

Interested? Check out the position description for more information about the position, and to apply.

Hmm … wouldn’t it be nice if work travel could take me somewhere other than the excitement capital of Australia? Anyway, another early morning start yesterday, and a typically late flight leaving Sydney. Then the usual ten-thousand-round-about-hell-ride from the airport to ANU campus. There must be something in the Canberra water supply that makes taxi drivers actually speed up to go around those round-abouts.

An interesting meeting though, so it wasn’t a waste of effort . Presented my recent work on re-architecting the retrieval API for our Myriad platform to a bunch of software engineers in our Canberra lab. I’ve basically been borrowing lots of service-oriented ideas to produce a flexible, modular, declarative API for others to hook-in interesting retrieval technologies to our platform. Ended up having some interesting discussions around web services, WSDL, genericity, and declarative configuration of Myriad, and we’ve got a reasonable plan for progressing things from here.

Finished up early afternoon, and ended up getting wait-listed for an earlier flight back to Sydney. Got confirmation of seating on that plane, but then was a couple of minutes too late to the airport, so got bumped back a flight, and ended up spending 45 minutes or so in the thrilling confines of Canberra airport (not for the first time either …). Still, I did get home earlier than originally anticipated, which was good. Most of that was negated by a 1 hour+ trip back home from the airport through peak hour gridlock though .

Shell’s mum is up for a few days, but I get the feeling I’ll hardly see her, since I’m madly trying to finish off my research proposal and presentation before the next uni semester starts next week. So much for a break between semesters!!

Another excellent HAIL Seminar today, this time from Liesl Capper, founder and until recently CEO of Sydney based web-search company Mooter Search.

Liesl’s talk wandered across a lot of ground, from touching on definitions of both artificial and human intelligence, through to why personalisation is really important for web searching, and what traits are most useful to use when trying to determine reliable features with which to reason about personalising information.

Over lunch, we found out more about Liesl’s background and uncovered her great passion and enthusiasm for, well, just about everything! She’s already successfully started at least 3 businesses (including Mooter), and now that she’s no longer in a hands-on role at Mooter, is considering her options for starting her next business.

I’m hopeful that our paths may cross again in the future, as Liesl expressed interest in perhaps working in a few areas that are certainly on the radar at CSIRO. Similarly, I know that Liesl has a few contacts who would be very interested in our knowledge and expertise in information delivery (including one largish search company who shall for the moment remain nameless).

I think Liesl is one of those energetic people who could really inspire herself (and others) to great things. Even within the few hours she spent with us today, it was clear to me that she has something of a tireless energy about her and that she’s very positive and sure about achieving whatever goals she sets for herself. I’m quite sure that’s exactly the kind of drive that has helped Liesl to business success.

After an executive committee meeting for ALTA this morning, my day switched gear and ended up being completely taken up filming footage for a new Channel 10 science show called Scope. It’s being produced by the same crew who do Totally Wild, and I gather it’s a similar target audience (8-14 year olds). The producer, camera guy and audio guy were all really nice people, which certainly helped put me more at ease.

My job was to deliver 3 short 90 second segments on camera, explaining 3 different pieces of technology: mp3 players, mobile phones and the internet. Sounds simple huh? Should take maybe 30 minutes? Think again!! First of all, each of those 90 seconds is split into several different grabs, each of which must be recorded at least a couple of times to give the editors enough to play with (not to mention all the times I stuffed up my lines! ). Add into that the need to select and change scenes for each of those grabs, wait for planes etc to finish flying overhead to stop messing up the audio track etc. Not to mention changing my clothes three times (once for each segment), finding a suitable location for each of the segments, and doing some voice-over recording for other footage in each segment.

I’m quite sure when the show finally goes to air that I’ll die of embarassment, especially seeing as I was coerced into “surfing” the internet in board shorts and a hawaiian shirt!! Not sure I’ll live that down in a hurry! Still, it was a tiring and enjoyable day – a different experience that I don’t regret one bit. Not sure I’m quite ready to give up my day job just yet …

Just attended a very interesting seminar given by Professor Enrico Coiera from the Centre for Health Informatics at UNSW.

(more…)

Yet another tiring day in Canberra. Another 6am start and early morning breakfast in the Qantas Club (ahh, the perks of travelling with Cécile ). A worthwhile meeting though – setting strategic direction for our Information Engineering Lab. The really nice thing from my point of view is that our future direction aligns very nicely with where I want to focus for my Masters thesis and PhD. I’m not sure that the details are supposed to be public yet, so I won’t talk about the details of what our excellent plans are!! Suffice to say that there’s plenty of real problems to solve and lots of exciting research work in store for us all.

Unfortunately, my 512Mb Imation USB 2.0 Swivel Flash Drive failed on Friday. It is actually the prize that I won for my best presentation award at the CSIRO ICT Centre Science and Engineering Conference in October, which makes it just that bit crappier having broken it.

I’m not sure what happened to it – it worked fine on Thursday night for backing up the SciFly data from our hired PC, but when I came to plug it in to my laptop on Friday morning, it simply isn’t recognised. I also tried it on my desktop PC with no luck either. I rang Imation technical support, and their “support” was decidedly underwhelming. Apparently I have to track down where it was bought from, and return it to the place of purchase, even though it’s still under the “1 year limited warranty” (what exactly is a limited warranty anyway?). I’ve started doing this, but it depends on the right people being able to find the receipts from October (given that it was bought as a prize).

In brighter news, after sending an email about my tale of woe to a few people (trying to track down the receipt from the original purchase) I got an email from our Communications Manager on Friday night in which he said:

Please go out and buy the finest, sexiest USB key you can find and buy it for yourself … I will re-imburse you.

Thanks for your incredible efforts at CeBIT and in the lead up

Excellent hey? It’s nice to have someone recognise the effort that I put in for CeBIT – it was a hell of a lot of work. It was of course very satisfying to have everything work out so well, but it’s also nice for people to make a point of saying thanks. Recognition of a job well done is easy to provide, but easy to forget. When people make the effort to say thanks (properly and sincerely), it goes a long way in my books.

So now I’m trying to work out whether to trust my data to another Imation or not. I really like the design of their product, and up until this mishap I’ve been very happy with the Swivel Flash drive. But now I have hesitations, both about the robustness/reliability of their products, but more so about their reluctant support. Does anyone have recommendations for a nice USB flash drive?

I didn’t have time to look at this for CeBIT, but it seems that there’s a simple way to manage the RMI server programmatically, rather than having to rely on external scripts to ensure that an RMI server is available on the appropriate machine.

To start the server on port 1099 (the default RMI port), just execute:

Registry reg = LocateRegistry.createRegistry(1099);


And to stop it again on shutdown, try:

UnicastRemoteObject.unexportObject(reg,true);


Simple eh? The only thing to be careful of is that the LocateRegistry.createRegistry() method returns the Registry object itself, not a stub (as the other RMI methods do). I’m just going to add this into SciFly, to make it one less thing for people to think about when running SciFly (to remind you, I use RMI to communicate between the barcode scanner, user interface servlet and natural language generation engine components).