2010 Research Seminar Series Presentations

Professor Vijay Varadharajan   "Writing high quality grant applications"

Bio: Vijay Varadharajan is currently Professor and Microsoft Chair in Innovation in Computing at Macquarie University (2001-todate). He is also the Director of Information and Networked System Security (INSS) Research. Before this he was Chairman of School of Computing and IT at University of Western Sydney (1996-2000).

Previously, Vijay has headed Security Research at HP Labs Bristol, UK (1988-1995). During his tenure at HP Labs., under his leadership, some 6 different security technologies were transferred into successful HP products in Divisions. He also headed the Technical Security Strategy Initiative at HP under the Senior Vice President. Before this, he was a Research Manager at British Telecom Research Labs. U.K (1987-88). From 1985 till 1987, he was Research Fellow and Lecturer in Computer Science at Plymouth and Reading Universities. He did his Ph.D in Computer and Communication Security in the U.K (1981-1984) from Plymouth and Exeter Universities in U.K., which was sponsored by BT Research Labs. He did his Electronic Engineering degree from Sussex University, UK (1978-1981). He was awarded the 1981 Prize of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, IEE, for outstanding performance at Sussex University and the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals Award (UK).

Vijay has had several visiting positions at different institutions over the years including Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge UK, Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at National University of Singapore, Invited Professor at French National Research Labs (INRIA), Invited Professor at the Indian Inst. of Technology, Research Scientist at Fujitsu Research Labs, Fellow at British Telecom Research Labs., UK and Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Vijay was on the Board of International Advisors of TCPA, USA, originally formed by HP, Microsoft, Intel, Sun and Compaq. Now TCPA is known as TCG and TCPA security specification is currently being in products endorsed by numerous companies. Vijay is a member of the Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board (Microsoft, USA). He is also a member of the Australian Government's Peak Security Advisory Body, ITSEAG, for the Ministry of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy, Australia. Previously he has acted as an Expert in Security for the European Union and for the UK Dept. of Trade and Industry. He has also acted as consultant and architect for several projects in computing, financial and telecom organizations in the UK, US and in Australia. He has been the Technical Board Director of Computer Science at Australian Computer Society (1999-2006), and a member of the Board of Studies NSW Australian Government since 2005.

Vijay has published more than 280 papers in International Journals and Conferences, has co-authored and edited 8 books on Information Technology, Security, Networks and Distributed Systems and holds 2 patents. His research work over the years has contributed to the development of several successful secure commercial systems in the areas of Secure Distributed Applications, Secure Network Systems, Security Tools, Secure Mobile Systems as well as Cryptographic and Smart Card based Systems and secure financial, telecom and medical solutions. His current areas of research interest include Web Services Security, Secure Distributed Applications, Trusted Computing, Security Policies and Management in Distributed Systems, Internet Security, Secure Mobile Agents, Security in Mobile Networks, Wireless Security, Secure E-Commerce, Security Policies, Models and Architectures and Protocols. He has supervised successfully many PhD Research students in UK and Australia.

He has given 15 keynote speeches at international conferences, and has been a program committee member/chaired over 150 international conferences all over the world. He is an Editorial Board member of several journals including the prestigious ACM Transactions on Information System Security (USA), Journal of Information Security, Springer (Germany), Computer and Communication Security Reviews (UK) as well as the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) and IEEE Security and Privacy (from 2009). His research work has been supported by industry such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, British Telecom and Fujitsu, as well as government agencies such Australian Research Council (ARC), UK Research Council (EPSRC), Australian Defense (DSD), Dept of Prime Minister and Cabinet Australia and European Union (COST, EUREKA, ESPRIT, RACE).

He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), a Fellow of the IEE, UK (FIEE), a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and Applications, UK (FIMA), a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Engineers (FIEAust), a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (FACS) and a Senior Member of IEEE (SMIEEE).

Presented: 14 January 2010
Video Link:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_research_140110&start=00:07:15&end=00:52:57&formats=3

Professor Donna Brien  Margaret Fulton in 1968: The birth of an Australian food writer as activist

ABSTRACT: Today, food writing makes up a significant proportion of the texts written, published, sold and read each year in Australia. While the food writing published in magazines and cookbooks has often been thought of as providing useful, but relatively banal, practical skills-based information, recent reassessments have suggested that food writing is much more interesting and important than this. In the contemporary context, when the mere mention of food engenders considerable anxiety, food writers play a number of roles beyond providing information on how to buy, store, prepare and serve various provisions. Instead, contemporary food writers engage with a range of important issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agriculture, biodiversity and genetic modification, food miles and fair trade, food safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and other health issues. In this, Australian food writers are not only media commentators on these important issues, but also forward-thinking activists, advocating and campaigning for change. Moreover, they have been performing this important social role for many decades. This presentation focuses on Margaret Fulton's food writing in 1968 to investigate a key moment in the development of Australian food writers as activists.

PRESENTED: 25 March 2010
VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_visiting_professor_workshop_240310&start=00:05:40&end=00:54:05&formats=16

Helen Huntly Is persistence taught or caught? Two contrasting case studies in the context of first year University teaching.

ABSTRACT: This paper examines contrasting case studies involving two tutors of first year students enrolled in an undergraduate education program at an Australian University. Both tutors were given the same brief of designing a semester-long course that would foster the development of the habit of mind of persistence in their students. The two tutors went about it within different content areas and chose different approaches. Both worked within the principles of good practice to select their teaching strategies, but one explicitly taught her students about the habits of mind in general and persistence specifically, whereas the other did not mention it at all. Both sought to model the habit for their students, though the tutor who did not explicitly mention it to her class was more deliberate about the modeling. Given that the two courses were different it is not possible to compare student results to see if one approach worked better than the other. However, in both cases, the tutors felt that the students had demonstrated more persistence than previous groups they had taught. The tutors also commented that they had personally learned a lot from engaging with this specific focus and would seek to continue to incorporate it into their teaching and learning plans. Rather than emphasising conclusions based on these two cases, this paper aims to open up the topic for discussion at this conference.
Key words: persistence, habits of mind, principles of good practice.

PRESENTED:  26 May 2010
VIDEO LINK:      http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_visiting_professor_260510&start=00:07:40&end=00:45:17&formats=16

Mr Jadon Grayson Learning Techniques in Artificial Intelligence Applied to Turn-Based Strategy Games

ABSTRACT: The seminar will discuss the properties of turn-based strategy games and the importance of intelligent programs which can learn to play them without aid from human experts.

Topics covered include the need for artificial intelligence in strategy games, the attributes of strategy games which make them an ideal testing environment for AI development, the importance of learning techniques capable of operating without human intervention, a brief look at Artificial Neural Networks and an overview of Genetic Algorithms, a method which simulates the process of evolution via natural selection.

PRESENTED:  3 June 2010
VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_030610&start=00:03:11&end=00:38:30&formats=16 

Dr Ashfaqur Rahman and Brijesh Verma: "A Novel Ensemble Classifier Approach using Weak Classifier Learning on Overlapping Clusters" 

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a novel approach for creating and training of an ensemble classifier. The approach is based on creating atomic and non-atomic clusters at different levels, training of weak classifiers on overlapping clusters and fusion of their decisions. The subsets of data are obtained by clustering of original training data sets into multiple partitions. As each partition represents highly correlated patterns from different classes, the proposed approach trains weak classifiers on difficult-to-classify patterns and combines the decision at various levels. The approach is tested on six benchmark datasets from UCI machine learning repository. The results show that the proposed approach achieves better classification accuracy than the existing approaches.

PRESENTED: 7 July 2010
VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_070710&start=00:00:57&end=00:52:56&formats=16 

Jo Kehoe "Rural landholders in Queensland Australia: legislation, litigation and litigants".

ABSTRACT: The management of vegetation on rural land is a major law and policy issue not only within Queensland but also within Australia and globally. There has been limited scholarly research on this issue. Vegetation management legislation is essentially the regulation of land clearing and therefore has considerable implications for biodiversity and climate change. This is especially so for Queensland, where more than 141 million hectares of land is used for agriculture. The inevitable emergence of vegetation management as an environmental concern reflects, inter alia, growing environmental awareness and pressure for change from environmentalists. A primary focus of this paper is the Vegetation Management Act (1999) (Qld), one of the most controversial pieces of legislation to be debated in the Queensland Parliament in the last decade. One particular area of contention following from this Act has been the litigation surrounding vegetation clearing offences. Consideration is therefore given to the complex web of state vegetation legislation and the attendant enforcement litigation of some clearing offences. The courts and judiciary present an important forum for testing the law and challenges to the Act may potentially provide practical precedent as evidenced in this paper. Negotiating a proficient pathway through the justice system however requires competent legal representation; many perils await the injudicious litigant in person. 

VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_070710&start=00:00:57&end=00:52:56&formats=16 

Professor Denis Cryle Grant re-submission: How much work does it entail?  

ABSTRACT: This seminar looks at ways in which an external inter-disciplinary application is being revisited in order to make it more competitive in the upcoming ARC round.
 
Issues to be discussed include: how/when to start, reviewer feedback, identifying fresh approaches, relevant international literature and methodological implications, publishing strategies, and the redrafting/ recycling of application components.

PRESENTED: 04 August 2010
VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/research/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_040810&start=00:06:00&end=00:52:57&formats=16 

Angelina Ambrosetti (Noosa)  Mentoring & Learning to Teach

ABSTRACT:  This research focuses on mentoring in pre-service teacher professional placements. As student teachers are engaging in their professional placement, they have specific perceptions of what will happen and how their mentor teacher will work with them.    Survey research was undertaken with first year and final year student teachers to discover their perceptions about the mentoring relationships they were involved in during their professional placements.   Specifically, the survey focused on the student teacher's role in mentoring, their mentor teacher's role and expectations of what they will learn during their professional placements.   Responses from first year and final year student teachers were compared in order to discover whether their perceptions and expectations change as they progress through the program and experience several professional placements and mentor teachers.   This paper overviews the results of the survey and uses the survey data to propose a framework for mentoring that facilitates mentoring relationships between mentors and mentees during the professional placement. 

PRESENTED: 06 August 2010
VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/research/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_060810&start=00:06:25&end=00:52:57&formats=16 

Gerard Ilott  Reconstructing IT governance using Foucault

ABSTRACT: At a time when information and its related technology have never been more important for the conduct of commerce, the question "what is IT governance?" is far from settled. This presentation introduces a conceptual project that examines IT governance from the perspective of a social discourse. Some governance events will be analysed to demonstrate that when Michel Foucault's techniques of archaeology and social discourse analysis are applied, a fuller conceptualisation of IT governance is achieved. At the same time, the IT governance literature is provided with a theoretical model that unites its disparate elements.

PRESENTED:  18 August 2010
VIDEO LINK:      http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/research/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_180810&start=00:01:44&end=00:50:37&formats=16 

Kazi Islam  A Social-Psychological Explanation of Accounting Distortions in the USA and Australia: Analysis of Two Cases

ABSTRACT: Corporate collapses in the USA and Australia during the last two decades have witnessed various ways of accounting distortions, their justifications, arguments and severe impacts of those on the global economy. WorldCom and HIH Insurance, the biggest cases of corporate failures in the USA and Australia respectively, were selected for this paper. Accounting distortions (alternatively known as accounting discrepancies, scandals, manipulation, irregularities) in the selected cases have been seen in the lens of a social-psychological theory popularly known as the ‘fraud-triangle' theory. This theory was basically developed by the sociologists to explain "white-collar crime'. Available evidences suggest that a simultaneous existence of incentives and opportunities caused by subjective judgements for accounting estimates, absence of proper governance, and lack of penalties for wrong doing had combined effects on the accounting distortions and resulting corporate collapses. The pre- and post-collapse attitudes of the senior management demonstrate the ways of rationalising accounting distortions.      

Keywords:  distortions, manipulation, fraud triangle, incentives, pressures, opportunities, rationalization.   

PRESENTED: 01 September 2010
VIDEO LINK:   http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/staff/fabie/fabie_research_010910&start=00:08:20&end=00:53:00&formats=16

Prof Denis Cryle Postgraduate research : what makes an effective Principal Supervisor?

Abstract
The Panel, comprising senior researchers from across the Faculty, will informally discuss  RHD supervision from different disciplinary perspectives, including such matters as: role models for supervisors, challenges and changes to supervisor roles, indicators of effective supervision and priority training needs.

Presented: 15 September 2010      
Video Link:    http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/research/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_15092010&start=00:00:00&end=00:44:30&formats=16

Brad Bowden Unionism yesterday and today: strategies and strength

Abstract:
This  presentation explores the complex factors that contributed to union success and failure between the 1820s and 2010. It argues that the rise and decline of Australian unionism cannot be understood solely through the prism of arbitration. Certainly arbitration boosted membership while reducing the need for workplace bargaining. But unionism was a major force before 1900 and a post-1900 surge in membership was due to industrial labour's own organising efforts, as well as arbitration. The development of manufacturing behind protective tariffs also assisted union growth. Declining union density was due, in the first instance, to structural changes in the economy during the 1950s and 1960s. While union decline is often seen as a recent phenomenon in fact union density peaked in both Queensland and Australia in 1948. The dismantling of arbitration after 1986 exacerbated this established pattern of decline, as did a growth in precarious employment and employer anti-union strategies. The paper argues that most current union strategies aimed at rebuilding support are ineffective and that a recovery in union strength is  unlikely.

Presented: 29 September 2010
Video Link: http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/media_request.htm?file=cqu/research/fabie/fabie_research_seminar_290910&start=00:04:33&end=00:52:59&formats=16