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MCMC-09 Technical Program

MCMC-09 -- Some Program Highlights

Keynote Addresses

• Professor Carroll Morgan (NSW/NICTA) will address on 10th of June.
  
  • Topic: (In-)Formal Methods: The Lost Art
  • Date/Venue: 9:50 - 10:50; June 10, 2009; Room E6A102
  • Brief Bio: Carroll Morgan was first at UNSW (BSc), then Sydney University (PhD) and then felt that after eight years in academia it was time to see what this "real world" was, of software-at-the-coal-face that everyone seemed to be talking about. He planned (roughly) five years with a small company, then five years with a big one; and then "We'll see."

    Two years into working with ASCOMP Pty Ltd (based in Gordon on the North Shore), he was unexpectedly back at Sydney University taking over the Operating Systems course in mid-semester. (For that he used the John Lions "Unix Commentary" books.) The spell at ASCOMP had been a very steep learning curve, with experience gained mainly by watching other people's software disasters at close quarters --- and trying not to repeat them oneself.

    Two years more, and another unexpected move occurred --- this time to Oxford University for a three-month visiting position. That was extended to two years; and then those two years turned into a permanent appointment to the Faculty there, with the learning curve becoming nearly vertical. His work from then on was mainly in the area of Formal Methods, a topic in which Oxford at the time was particularly strong. Thus, the second time around, the experience was gained by observing others' successes.

    Almost twenty years later he returned to Australia, and for two years worked as a programmer developing web-based "solutions" in J2EE, a Java-based three-tier application-development environment for distributed business systems... and noticed that all that had changed in twenty years was that the inch-thick fan-folded hexadecimal core-dumps had turned into Java stack-traces in a font so large that all but the last line scrolled off the top of the screen --- and, worse, one had no idea from which machine in which city the exception had come from. That finished with his becoming an Australian Professorial Fellow at UNSW, and returning to research.

    His recent work has been mainly on probabilistic programs (and their semantics), and --most recently-- on security; in his "spare time" he is writing an iPhone app, for which the learning curve is space-filling. He is convinced that things could be a lot better, and that it could start at the undergraduate level or even before.

• Professor Claude Sammut (UNSW node Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems) will address on 11th of June.
  • Topic: Robotics for Urban Search and Rescue.
  • Date/Venue: 11:30 - 12:30; June 11, 2009; E6A102.
  • Brief Bio: Claude Sammut is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group. He is the UNSW node Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems and a member of the joint ARC/NH&MRC project on Thinking Systems.

    His early work on relational learning helped to the lay the foundations for the field of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). With Donald Michie, he also did pioneering work in Behavioural Cloning. His current interests include Conversational Agents and Robotics. He was the leader of the UNSW teams that won RoboCup four-legged robot competitions in 2000, 2001 and 2003.

    Claude Sammut is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the Machine Learning Jourmal and New Generation Computing. He is the editor-in-chief of Springer's forthcoming Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and was the general chair for the 2007 International Conference on Machine Learning.

MCMC-09 HDR Debate

MCMC-09, for the first time, will feature a debate involving as participants academics and students from local universities. After the participants put forth their arguments, the audience will get the opportunity to ak questions to the participants, and then the leads will have their final say. Finally the audience will get to vote on which side wins. Everybody is welcome!

• Proposition: Publications based thesis is THE answer.
  Date: June 10th, 2009. 1:30 -- 2:30 pm.
  Chair A/Prof Anna Reid, Dept. of Education, Macquarie University
• For the Proposition:
  • Prof Mike Johnson (Department of Computing, Macquarie University)
  • A/Prof Sanjay Chawla (Head of School, School of IT, University of Sydney)
  • Dr. Alison Madelaine (Macquarie University Special Education Centre)
• Against the Proposition:
  • A/Prof Maurice Pagnucco (Director HDR, School of CSE, UNSW)
  • Dr. Alan Blair (School of CSE, UNSW)
  • ??
  We are expecting some students from the three universities in question to participate in the debate as well.

Technical Program Details

There are twenty eight talks iwith some special events in between. Each student talk is allotted 20 minutes, of which the first 15 minutes is talk-time and the last 5 minutes are for Q&A. The session chair will signal the speaker 5 minutes, and 1 minute before time runs out.

• Day #1: June 10th. Room E6A102

  Time	Speaker	Talk
  9:30 - 9:50	Stephen Thurgate, ExecutiveDean, Faculty of Science	Opening Address
  9:50 - 10:50	Carroll Morgan UNSW/NICTA	Keynote Speech: (In-)Formal Methods: The Lost Art
  10:50 - 11:10	MORNING TEA (Third Floor Tea Room)
  	Session #1: Language Technology. Room E6A102	Chair: Diego Molla-Aliod
  11:10 - 11:30	Andrew Lampert	Requests and Commitments in Email
  11:30 - 11:50	Mary Gardiner.	On sentiment and near-synonymy.
  11:50 - 12:10	Jette Viethen	A Computational Model for the Generation of Referring Expressions
  12:10 - 1:30	LUNCH
  1:30 - 2:30	Chair: Anna Reid	HDR Debate: Publications based thesis is THE answer.
  2:30 - 3:00	AFTERNOON TEA (Third Floor Tea Room)
  	Session #2 Rational Agents and Knowledge Representation	Chair: Peter Busch
  3:00 - 3:20	KRaghav Ramachandran	Resource-bounded belief contraction
  3:20 - 3:40	Armin Hezart.	Strength of arguments
  3:40 - 4:00	Ukachukwu Ndukwu.	Formal Verification of Probabilistic Systems
  4:00 - 5:00	MCMC-09 RECEPTION (Third Floor Tea Room)

• Day #2: June 11th. Room E6A102

  Time	Speaker	Talk
  	Session #3: Data Mining and Analysis	Chair: Jian Yang
  9:50 - 10:10	Akther Shermin	Using Dynamic Bayesian Network to Infer Gene Regulatory Networks
  10:10 - 10:30	Yihao Zhang	Short-term Prediction of Time Series Based on Element Oriented Analysis
  10:30 - 10:50	Moad Maghaydah	RDBMS-Based Storage for Dynamic XML Documents
  10:50 - 11:10	Hadi Mashinchi	Global Continuous Optimization
  11:10 - 11:30	MORNING TEA (Third Floor Tea Room)
  11:30 - 12:30	Claude Sammut Node Director, CoE for Autonomous Systems, UNSW	Keynote Speech: Robotics for Urban Search and Rescue.
  12:30 - 2:00	LUNCH
  	Session #4: Information Protection and Security I	Chair: Scott McCallum
  2:00 - 2:20	Nguyen Vo.	Protecting Web 2.0 Services from Botnet Exploitations
  2:20 - 2:40	Daniel Sutantyo	Mathematics of Elliptic Curve Cryptography
  2:40 - 3:00	Chiew Kang Leng	Investigation in Steganalysis
  3:00 3:20	Lei Li.	Trust Rating Aggregations in Service-Oriented Applications
  3:20 - 3:40	AFTERNOON TEA (Third Floor Tea Room)
  	Session #5: Information Protection and Security II	Chair: Rajan Shankaran
  3:40 - 4:00	Stephen McCombie	Phishing and Eastern European Organised Cybercrime
  4:00 - 4:20	Les Bell	A New Approach to Computational Trust
  4:20 - 4:40	Aarthi Nagarajan	Techniques for the Design of Trust Enhanced Secure Applications

• Day #3: June 12th. Room E6A102,

  Time	Speaker	Talk
  	Session #6: Web Services and Business Processes I	Chair: Yan Wang
  9:30 - 9:50	Yi Wang	A Framework for Behaviour Change Management in Service Composition
  9:50 - 10:10	Huiyuan Zheng Yi Wang	Adaptive Service Composition A Framework for Behaviour Change Management in Service Composition
  10:10 - 10:30	Haiyang Sun Huiyuan Zheng	Towards Security Management Systems in Service Oriented Business Collaboration Adaptive Service Composition
  10:30 - 10:50	Daiqin He	Authorization Control in Business Collaboraiton
  10:50 - 11:10	MORNING TEA (Third Floor Tea Room)
  	Session #7: Human-centred Computing	Chair: Len Hamey
  11:10 - 11:30	Iwan Kartiko	Does the Visual Complexity of Animated-Virtual Actors in Virtual Reality Applications affect learning?
  11:30 - 11:50	Susan Bruck	Cybersickness and Anxiety During Simulated Motion: Implications for Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
  11:50 - 12:10	Xenogene Gray.	The Epistemology of Expertise
  12:10 - 12:30	Maximilian Wittmann	Understanding how students learn Computer Graphics
  12:30 - 2::00	MCMC-09 LUNCH (Provided) (Third Floor Tea Room)
  	Session #8: Web Services and Business Processes II	Chair: Manolya Kavakli
  2:00 - 2:20	Rolf Kluge	A Service-oriented approach to requirements-driven selection of commercial off-the-shelf software solutions
  2:20 - 2:40	Mahbub Hassan	A Framework for Mobile Service Provisioning
  2:40 - 3:00	Sri Madhisetty	Adoption of service based computing in the IT-industry.
  3:00 - 4:00	MCMC-09 Panel Discussion , Closing + Awards	Future of MCMC: Where do we go from Here? Chair: Bernard Mans  Panelists include: Trish Fanning, Associate Dean (HDR), Faculty of Science