SoIT's News, Issue 3 2008

Graduations and Honorary Degrees

Students graduating from IT degrees earlier this year were in exceptional company. Professor John Hopcroft and Sir William Tyree were awarded the Honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering at separate graduation ceremonies in May.

Professor Hopcroft is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University, USA. In 1986 he was honoured with the A M Turing Award (which is regarded by many as the equivalent to the Nobel Prize for Computer Science) for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.

In addition to his research work, which centres on the theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, automata theory, and graph algorithms, Professor Hopcroft is well known for his books on algorithms and formal languages which are regarded as classic texts in the field.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, IEEE, and the ACM.

In the Computer Science field, Professor Hopcroft is an outstanding force both in intellectual contributions and in commitment to service and building the discipline. He has been a mentor to academic staff, giving guidance on research projects and directions the School of IT is very fortunate to have an ongoing relationship with him.

Sir William Tyree is a pioneer in the electrical engineering industry, founding Tyree Industries in 1956. After two decades of success in industry, in 1970 Sir William made a generous philanthropic investment and established the A W Tyree Foundation. In the 1990’s the A W Tyree Foundation sponsored the Tyree Scholarship for IT students at the University of Sydney. As well as providing financial support to the recipient for the length of their degree, the scholarship allowed a semester of study at an overseas university. By coincidence, Adam Hudson, the first recipient of the Tyree Scholarship graduated from his PhD studies at the same ceremony at which Sir William was honoured.

Adam was one of many IT PhD students who graduated that day:

• Daniel Cutting, Balancing implicit group Messaging over Peer-to-Peer Networks
• Adam Hudson, Walkabout: An Asynchronous Messaging Architecture for Mobile Devices
• Monther Tarawenah, A Novel Quartet-Based Method for Inferring Evolutionary Trees from Molecular Data
• Yan Zhang, Autonomic Performance Configuration for Component Middleware Systems
• Lanbo Zheng, Optimisation Methods for some Constrained Crossing Number Problems
• Tanveer Zia, A Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Congratulations to all the undergraduate and postgraduate students who graduated at the three ceremonies in May.

Photo: Dr Adam Hudson and Sir William Tyree.