SoIT's News, Issue 4 2008

From the Head of School

Academics are often accused of living in ivory towers disconnected from main street. I actually see this as an advantage. Staying at arms length from the hustle and bustle of everyday commerce allows us to reflect beyond the next quarterly earnings report. However, it is important, if we are to solve real problems facing society, to have a pulse of “main street”. That is where I see an alumnus organization, in particular the University of Sydney Information Technology Alumni Association (USITAA) acting as a bridge between academics and the “real world.” The world of academia is governed by peer-reviewed research which slowly gets filtered down into teaching material which we then impart to students. We are usually unmoved by short term flares (sometimes to our disadvantage) and focus on “creating a student” who is steeped in ideas and can survive and thrive in the market place for at least a quarter of a century if not more. How are our students performing in the “real world?”, What new challenges are they facing? What pragmatics are in-vogue within Computing and Information Technology? These are some of the questions that we hope that USITAA will help us answer.

Now coming back to our ivory tower! October is the month of an important ritual in all of academia. This is the time when the results of the research grant applications to the Australian Research Council (ARC) are announced. The grant applications are submitted in March and through a slow but “thorough” peer-review process roughly twenty percent of the applications are deemed successful by a high-priest panel in Canberra. The exciting news this year is that SIT has done exceedingly well. Our academic staff were involved in at least seven winning applications. The diversity and richness of IT can be gleaned from the types of the successful grant. Michael Charleston and Bing Bing Zhou won separate grants in bioinformatics. Peter Eades and Seokhee Hong application was about visualizing large data sets. Bjorn Landfeldt and Libmann will use game theory to understand Internet traffic. Fekete and Röhm will use mathematical tools to solve a “real world” problem about how to make databases work faster without comprising their integrity! David Feng for designing computing algorithms which will improve the accuracy of medical imaging equipment. No other discipline encompasses the breadth of IT.

Regards, Sanjay