Date: 12-1pm, Monday 12 May 2008
Location: 50-s201, Hawken Engineering Building, St Lucia Campus, The University of Queensland
Speaker: Prof Shirley Gregor, The Australian National University
Title: WHY I.T. RESEARCH IS NOT SCIENCE AND WHY IT MATTERS
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Abstract: This presentation will argue that science is the wrong model for research in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) disciplines, including Information Systems, Computer Science and Software Engineering. Researchers have continued to draw their ideas of research and theorizing from the physical and social sciences (or mathematics) perhaps because of a need for legitimacy or unawareness of alternative approaches. This fixation on the scientific model has many serious consequences: a lack of cumulative theory building in areas of ICT, poor guidance in research methods, little idea of what our own theory should look like and consequent shortcomings in what we contribute to practice. Some good work has been done, including Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial, the constructive traditions in Scandinavia and the recent popularization of design science. Yet many questions need to be further addressed and these questions offer important opportunities for the future. How do design theories address the wide range of artifacts in ICT? How do we deal with the creativity aspect of artifact construction? How far can we go in building generalizations about design? How do we abstract theory about design from practice? What should we be teaching research students about methods?
Biography: Shirley Gregor is the ANU Endowed Chair in Information Systems at the Australian National University, Canberra, where she heads the National Centre for Information Systems Research and is a member of the School of Accounting and Business Information Systems. Professor Gregor's current research interests include the adoption and strategic use of information and communications technologies, the philosophy of technology, intelligent systems and human-computer interface issues. Dr Gregor has led several large projects in the e-commerce area funded by the Meat Research Corporation, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, and the Australian Research Council. Professor Gregor spent a number of years in the computing industry in Australia and the United Kingdom before beginning an academic career. She obtained her Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Queensland. Dr Gregor's publications include 4 edited books, 15 book chapters and over 100 papers in conferences and journals such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association of Information Systems, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, CACM, European Journal of Information Systems and Information Technology & People. Professor Gregor was inaugural President of the Australasian Association of Information Systems 2002-2003. She is currently Region 3 (Asia/Pacific) Councillor for the Association of Information Systems and Director of the Professional Standards Board of the Australian Computer Society. She is a also a Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly. Professor Gregor was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2005 for services as an educator and researcher in the field of information systems and in the development of applications for electronic commerce in the agribusiness sector. Also, in 2005 she was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society.
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Date: 4-5PM, Thursday, 3 April 2008
Location: 78-622 UQ School of ITEE, St Lucia Campus
Speaker: Prof Xuemin Lin, The University of New South Wales
Title: Selecting Stars: The k Most Representative Skyline Operator
Abstract:Skyline computation has many applications including multi-criteria decision making. In this talk, we investigate the problem of selecting k skyline points so that the number of points, which are dominated by at least one of these k skyline points, is maximized. We first present an efficient dynamic programming based exact algorithm in a 2d-space. Then, we show that the problem is NP-hard when the dimensionality is $3$ or more and it can be approximately solved by a polynomial time algorithm with the guaranteed approximation ratio 1 - 1/e. To speed-up the computation, an efficient, scalable, index-based randomized algorithm is developed by applying a probabilistic counting technique. A comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates that our randomized technique is very efficient, highly accurate, and scalable. (Joint work with Yidong Yuan, Qing Zhang, and Ying Zhang)
Biography:Xuemin Lin is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Currently, he is the head of the database research group in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW and the leader of the research program of data and knowledge management in ARC Research Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII). Xuemin got his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Queensland (Australia) in 1992 and his BSc in Applied Math from Fudan University (China) in 1984. During 1984-1988, he studied for PhD in Applied Math at Fudan University. Before join UNSW, Xuemin taught at the University of Western Australia after a 2 years research fellow appointment at the University of Queensland. In 2005, he was a visiting researcher in Microsoft Asia Research Lab and visited Tokyo University as a JSPS fellow. In 1999/2000 he also taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a visiting Associate Professor. His current research interests lie in data streams, graph databases, keyword search, probabilistic queries, spatial and temporal databases, and web information systems. He published over 120 papers in both theoretical computer science and database systems, including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, WWW, TODS, TKDE, VLDBJ, Theoretical Computer Science, Algorithmic, Computational Geometry J, etc. These include 3 best paper student paper awards in ADC04, APWEB05, and ICDE07, respectively. He has received a number research grants and awards in the above research areas including ARC discovery, GOOGLE research award, and UNSW gold-star award. He has been also involved as a PC in a number of conferences, including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE. Currently, he is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems.
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Date: 10am, Wednesday 20 January 2008
Location: 78-420 UQ School of ITEE, St Lucia Campus
Speaker: Prof Christian Becker, University of Mannheim, Germany
Title: System Support for Pervasive Computing
Abstract: In the vision of Pervasive Computing computers pervade our daily environment - mostly as embedded systems that augment our surrounding. Applications can utilize a number of services that are available in the physical proximity in order to offer their users services tailored to their current context. Due to mobility and effects, such as power saving, services will fluctuate. Applications have to adapt to compensate fluctuations as well as make use of "better" services that become available. In the Peer to Peer Pervasive Computing project 3PC we have investigated middleware concepts that allow to establish a so called smart peer group that is formed from devices with a common mobility pattern. Within this smart peer group, resources are shared. We named this middleware BASE and used it as a technical foundation to investigate concepts and mechanism for automated application adaptation. In our component system PCOM contracts between components are enriched in their semantics and thus allow the system to automatically substitute a component in case of fluctuations or availability of a better candidate. The talk closes with an outlook to current research that builds on the concepts developed in 3PC.
Bio: Christian Becker is a full professor for Information Systems at the University of Mannheim since 2006. Prior to this he was a visiting professor for distributed systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Spring Term 2006. He studied Computer Science at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern where he received the Diploma in 1996. From 1997 till 2001 he was a researcher at the distributed systems and operating systems group at the University of Frankfurt where he received his PhD in 2001 with a thesis about Quality of Service Management in Distributed Object Systems. In 2001 he joined the distributed systems group at the University of Stuttgart as Post Doc. His research focussed on system support for Pervasive Computing and Context-Aware Computing. He was a member of the Nexus project that investigates concepts for global scale context management. In 2004 he received the venia legendi (Habilitation) for Computer Science (Informatik). Christians research interests are distributed systems and Context-Aware Computing.
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Date: 3-4PM, Friday 25 January 2008
Location: 78-420 UQ School of ITEE, St Lucia Campus
Speaker: Prof Xiaoming Li, Peking University, China
Title: Analysis of User Behavior in a P2P File Sharing System
Abstract: Reputation is a big topic. Many people from various channels are interested in it. In this talk, I'll take on something specific. In particular, I'll show how models may be mapped onto real systems. This is exemplified by our work on Maze, a large scale peer-to-peer file sharing system deployed in China by network lab at Peking University. The talk will first address some aspect of user behaviors in a peer-to-peer file sharing system like Maze. More specifically, using the logs collected from Maze, three typical kinds of "disreputable" behaviors are identified, namely free riding, collusion, and file pollution. The statistics and patterns of them are presented. Moreover, the effectiveness of EigenTrust (a famous P2P reputation algorithm) is tested against Maze log data and we have found that EigenTrust has some difficulties in generating proper trust values for certain important peers. And we propose some measure to cure the problems.
Bio: LI Xiaoming received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology (USA) in 1986 and has since taught at Harbin Institute of Technology and Peking University. He has founded the Chinese web archive WebInfoMall (http://www.infomall.cn), the search engine Tianwang (http://e.pku.edu.cn), the peer-to-peer file sharing network Maze (http://maze.pku.edu.cn), and other popular web channels. He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, a senior member of IEEE, currently a Vice President of Chinese Computer Federation, International Editor of Concurrency (John Wiley), and Associate Editor of Journal of Web Engineering (Rinton). He has published over 100 papers, authored Search Engine - Principle, Technology, and Systems (Science Press, 2005), and received numerous achievement awards from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Beijing Municipal Government, and other agencies.
