About 180 people attended the RCC-hosted Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW) at UQ St Lucia a fortnight ago.
Computing Research and Education Australasia (CORE) currently organises and underwrites ACSW.
This year’s CORE award-winners delivered keynote speeches at the conference, namely:
- Associate Professor Lexing Xie, Australian National University, winner of the 2018 CORE Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research
- Dr Junhao Gan, The University of Queensland, winner of the 2018 CORE John Makepeace Bennett (Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation) Award, and
- Dr Antonette Mendoza, University of Melbourne, winner of the 2018 CORE Teaching Award.
Professor Ann Nicholson of Monash University also gave a keynote address, titled “Can A.I. Techniques Help Intelligence Analysts?”
An exciting stream focused on training opportunities for Early Career Researchers and Higher Degree Research students was added to this year’s conference. These included:
- a panel on how to apply for an ARC DECRA (Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award), led by former members of the ARC College of Experts and successful DECRA fellows
- a panel on how to build and run industry collaborations, with successful members of the computer science community.
- a panel/workshop on how to apply for a promotion, with former and current heads of school and other successful people
- an academic integrity workshop, led by UQ’s integrity team.
- a grant writing workshop, led by ARC external reviewers and successful awardees
- a panel on how to prepare for Australian Computer Society and Engineers Australia accreditation, led by teams who have been successful
- a set of lightning talks and posters, given by both senior and early career academics.
In addition, UQ’s School of IT and Electrical Engineering hosted two workshops for members of the broader community. These included an industry-sponsored workshop for current undergraduate students aimed at enhancing employability in the IT industry, and a professional development workshop for high school teachers and their students. These were well attended and added a novel theme to the week.
Next year, this new format involving workshops and panels will be applied at ACSW 2019 at Macquarie University in Sydney.
ACSW traditionally has a number of sub-conferences, and this year these included the:
- 20th Australasian Computing Education Conference
- 14th Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling
- 19th Australian User Interface Conference
- 16th Australasian Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing
- 11th Australasian Conference on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management
- Australasian Web Conference
- Australasian Information Security Conference
- Interactive Entertainment Conference.
RCC's Dr Nick Hamilton acted as ACSW 2018’s official photographer. View all his photos from the event on Flickr.
ACSW: A brief history
ACSW has a long history, dating back to the first event in 1974.
The first paper RCC Director Prof. David Abramson ever presented, as a graduate student, was at the then-named Australian Computer Science Conference in Brisbane in 1981.
From the mid-1990s, the event expanded from a generic conference to a cluster of focused conferences and workshops.
Over the years, ACSW has served a number of purposes, including as a traditional academic conference (with associated fully-refereed proceedings); as a focus for advocacy and networking events; and as a venue for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers from across Australia and New Zealand computing departments to meet and mingle.
