1 IIMS NEWS Being the newsletter of The Institute of Information & Mathematical Sciences, Massey University at Albany Edited by Andrea Babylon Inside: My Life in a Dustbin pg 2 Loud Shirt Day pg 3 Computer Science News pg 4 Kebnekaise pg 5 From t˙ Head of IIMS Tahuna Conference pg 10 From the Head of IIMS Acronyms and Names pg 11 Telegram-hacking Scandal pg 13 Dear all, Te Kooti's Pa pg 14 Snippets of History pg 17 Well this truly is the final IIMS newsletter, but like all Wood Pigeon pg 21 of the good things that IIMS does you can expect it to continue in the future in a substantially familiar format, probably on a tri-annual basis. I've been a member of IIMS since November 2004 (even while within NZIAS) and there have been a lot of changes particularly among the staff. Shaun and Carlo, relatively junior staff then, are now Associate Professors. The group in information systems has gone. There have been other promotions and appointments - the arrival of Marti and her group are of special note. Manifest suc- cesses too - Mick's FRSNZ, Robert's ANZIAM medal, other Fellowships and a good number of Marsden grants (10 or more I guess). Lots of other successes, grants, prizes and awards for IIMS staff over those years - go back and read the newsletters! IIMS has been success- ful, and now it will be part of something which I believe will be even stronger and offer those of us here at Al- bany an even greater opportunity to determine our own future. Just for the record (or if you happen to have been on long leave to Mars U.) IIMS, apart from the staff in IT, will be joining with INS to become INMS formally from 1 January, but in effect from 1 October Continued on page 2 2 this year. The IT staff will be supported by we can do as the \Sciences at Albany". As INMS until exactly where they finally set- I have repeatedly said, our strength and op- tle within SEAT has been decided. We had portunity lies in a multi-disciplinary focus, a wake and people spoke about the past, it unique in New Zealand. We have strength in was good to see many old (?) faces. But the all the sciences, but little by way of \critical future beckons. mass" so no discipline can go it alone. I'm sure this strength will be recognized in the The IIMS Postgraduate conference ran along PBRF round to be announced in April. We very smoothly this year. This is a really great will lead Massey and the country in a number event on the calendar of IIMS. Much thanks of areas. are due to Freda and Amjad for the running of this event (which will only be bigger next So my final words as IIMS HoI are an exhor- year). These things don't run themselves! Of tation to get involved with making the new course Freda will continue in her role sup- Institute the best it can be. porting the Postgraduate activity in the new Institute. I guess we were both pleasantly Cheers Gaven surprised to find out recently that our com- bined Institutes had over 75 PhD students Gaven Martin (!) so there will be a lot more variety next year (and bigger prizes ! On that front did anyone see Shaun eat the unclaimed prizes he tried to give out ?). I didn't get to go to many of the talks, but I did read the posters My Life in a Du<bin and found them to be very interesting and in some cases not unrelated to some of my My Life in a Dustbin own research. I think there are plenty of re- search & teaching synergies within IIMS that I am moving into the after life. As part of are as yet unexplored and this will only in- the passing over process I have emptied filing crease within the new Institute (I note that cabinets, desk drawers, notice boards, and one of the Ecologists cornered Ian Bond at shelves of reams of paper on the basis that I Fergusson's after our meeting asking if they can plead ignorance if anybody asks, What can clean up bird song data in the same way about X?. My dustbin runneth over. One of he clears up the astronomical data he deals the things that came to light as I cast off with). Maybe Ian will be out on Tiri to meet the mortal HoI coil was the following memo the dawn chorus next year with a microphone from the then Vice-Chancellor in 1994 re- in hand ? garding the School of Mathematical and In- formation Sciences. There is nothing new un- The Christmas party looms, traditionally in der the sun. See you in five years time when INS we give out a few $500 prizes for the we re-establish IIMS. best student publications that year. Since it will be a combined event (so as to improve \I have given further thought to the sug- the budget) you will need to think about get- gestion that the School of Mathematical and ting some names from IIMS to the new PG Information Sciences become a Faculty and Committee, to Robert, Ian or Freda, who will have consulted with a number of senior col- manage that process. leagues. It seems clear that there is a strong antipathy in the School to the counter pro- So as we move forward, let's explore what posal that it join the Faculty of Science and 3 this is clearly a factor which cannot be over- lieve, be unfortunate and helps persuade me looked. More importantly, I believe, is the that the amalgamation proposal is not a vi- argument that the Department of Informa- able one. The question, therefore, is whether tion Systems does not have a natural aca- or not the School becomes a Faculty. I see no demic home with Science and will wish to reason for denying this change..." be relocated in the Faculty of Business Stud- ies. This break from the School would, I be- Tony Norris Loud Shirt Day Loud Shirt Day Figure 1: From left to right: Mr Yan Ou, Dr Winston Sweatman, Dr Cathy Hassell-Sweatman, Freda Mickisch, Dr Barry McDonald. Photo sourced by Annette Warbrooke. 4 be playing a key role as we refine Computer Sciences place in the teaching and research nexus. Andre and Napoleon Reyes have also made great headway this year in developing Computer Science News a new software infrastructure for the robot soccer system. This has proved a valuable Computer Science News platform for student projects and this soft- ware gives CS's Computer Vision group a News from the Computer Science Group new area for research growth. Ken Hawick has further enhanced his al- Congratulations to Elena Calude who has ready formidable international reputation by been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Elena adding a British Computer Society Fellow- has recently published an important article ship to his Fellowships of the Institute of on \The complexity of Riemann's Hypothe- Physics and of the Royal Meteorological So- sis" in the Journal for Multiple-Valued Logic ciety. Ken also achieved another milestone and Soft Computing 18(3-4) (2012), 257-265. as he recently completed his 200th refereed publication. In addition, he has taken on Daniel Playne has taken over the director- two new PhD students Tim McMullen (co- ship of the Centre for Parallel Computing supervised with Chris Scogings) and Jeremy Research (CPC). As many will know al- Willemse (co-supervised with Martin John- ready, CPC has been repositioning itself to son). Tim and Jeremy are both working on focus on research into parallel computing al- advanced graphical simulation systems. gorithms, parallel languages and especially data-parallel computing based on the use of In May, Chris Scogings took over from graphical processing units (GPUs). Martin Howard Edwards as the Programme Direc- Johnson had led CPC to successes in grid tor for the Bachelor of Information Sciences. computing but Martin is now focussing on The \new look" BInfSc now offers majors in energy-efficient parallel computing. Martin Computer Science, Information Technology and Ken published a peer-reviewed article on and Software Engineering. Chris ceased act- this earlier in the year. ing as Institute Timetable Officer only to find that the new duties of Programme Directors In 2011, Napoleon Reyes went to Eastern Eu- included checking the timetable! Despite the rope, for his first sabbatical. His initial plan rigours of timetable checking, Chris managed to spend the sabbatical in Toyota, Japan to fit in the successful supervision of Delan was hindered by a staggering combination Ren who has completed his MSc thesis enti- of earthquakes and tsunami, followed by a tled \An Ant Colony Simulator". Chris has nuclear blast. It only goes to show that also blended his research area of agent-based we can always make the best of efforts to modelling together with his love of military have a grand \plan A", but in the end may history and produced a paper entitled \An still have to resort to \plan B". Nonethe- Agent-Based Model of the Battle of Isandl- less, his sabbatical gave him lots of unex- wana" to be presented at the Winter Simu- pected opportunities: he delivered his first lation Conference (Berlin, Germany) in De- invited keynote speech in an international cember 2012. workshop in Hungary, had his first TV in- terview appearance in a documentary film, Andre Barczak has taken over Chris's role as entitled \Dnes v buducnosti" (translated as Major Leader of Computer Science and will \Today, in the future") in Slovakia, an oral 5 presentation in an international conference Mitchell is studying for his PhD in GPU in Spain, and he also wrote a book chapter simulations with Ken and Chris, and Vic- publication regarding his research on path- tor is completing his Honours year and is planning using hybrid intelligent systems.