SoIT's News, Issue 1 2008

Alumni Profile: Vance Gledhill, BSc (1961)

Just over forty years ago, Professor Vance Gledhill graduated from the University of Sydney with a BSc majoring in physics. He was amongst the first students to study programming in Australia: “John Bennett had just built SILLIAC, and in second year all the physics students did a Christmas programming course in A9. It was all very exciting!” On graduating he found better job prospects in IT: “My first job was to teach punch-card machines at IBM. From there I moved into writing code and then eventually on to IT in medicine. That is when I got to tackle really tough problems using IT.”

Professor Gledhill says that working on decision-making in medicine is a highlight of his career. In the 1970s he developed a system that, without a doctor’s intervention, could make diagnoses, and recommend further investigation and treatment planning. “In a study we out-preformed a panel of doctors in making diagnoses.” Professor Gledhill was awarded the Swiss Karger Prize for Medical Research for this work: “I could work on it for hours, I just didn’t want to let it go. I wanted to improve a current system using IT, but beneath that was a desire to understand how people made decisions and to develop a tool that had certain attributes of the mind, and could be manipulated to come up with the same findings as the mind – it was fantastic.’

This achievement, amongst many others, was recently recognised when Professor Gledhill was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in this year’s Australia Day honours. The well-deserved appointment was made for ‘service to computer science as an academic, researcher and administrator, through contributions to the development of computer applications, particularly in the education and health sectors, and to the community.’

Professor Gledhill is retired, after a career that has included stints at UTS, UNSW, Macquarie University, Trinity College Dublin, The National College of Ireland, Royal Prince Albert Hospital, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and most notably as Founder and Director of the Microsoft Institute in the 1990s. Retirement has not slowed him down; he currently works with the School as an Honorary Associate in the Language and Knowledge Management Laboratory. Last year he also became one of the Directors of the National Computer Science School (NCSS).

NCSS is a summer program run for high school students, who live on campus for an intensive week of computer programming and web design. Professor Gledhill has proven a valuable addition to the team, NCSS 2008 was bigger and better than ever: “NCSS is an exceptional program. A small team of academic staff and student volunteers take a group of high school kids and expose them to a broader world of IT. Their enthusiasm is catching - if they don’t love IT before coming to NCSS, they certainly do when they leave!”

On top of these commitments Professor Gledhill has also returned to student life, undertaking a psychology degree at Sydney with a view to tackling some ‘really tough problems’ in that field: “I would like to work on research into pre-natal and neo-natal parenting, working with the indigenous people of Cape York.”

Are there still ‘really tough problems’ to work on in IT? “Yes there are. My interests lie in capturing human functions, for example emotions – can computers emulate anger, sadness, happiness? It is a bit ‘out there’, but lots of things have been done in this field that people in the past have thought impossible.”

Josephine Spongberg

Photo: Will Cannings