ACSC'96 Tutorial Programme
Nineteenth Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC'96)
Tutorial Programme
29 - 30 January 1996
STOP PRESS
Demand for tutorials has been sufficiently weak that the only one
that will be offered is Information
Retrieval. All of the other tutorials have been cancelled,
and those who registered for them will be given a full refund.
Alistair Moffat, 14 December 1995.
Location
The Information Retrieval tutorial will be held in Lecture Theatre 2,
SEECS Building, 221 Bouverie Street, Carlton 3053, commencing at
2:00pm and finishing at 5:00pm on Monday 29 January.
The SEECS building is 100m south of the main campus (across Grattan St)
and approximately 10
minutes walk from St.
Mary's College and 5 minutes walk from the conference venue.
As an innovation in 1996 ACSC will offer a full two-day programme of
tutorials.
All tutorials are subject to minimum enrolments.
To allow numbers to be estimated accurately,
enrolment prior to
December 1, 1995 is requested.
To enrol for tutorials, print the conference and tutorial
registration form, or send email to
acsc96@cs.mu.oz.au asking for the form, giving your postal or fax
address.
(Printed copies of the form will be distributed to all
Australasian Computer Science Departments in early November.)
Tutorials registration fees are
$140 for full registration,
$120 for CSA-member registration, and $60 for student registration.
Full (CSA member and CSA nonmember)
enrolment in second and subsequent tutorials will be charged at the rate
of $100 per registration; $50 for students.
Information about the Computer Science, Database, and Computing Theory
conferences appears here.
Tutorials Offered
While the Internet has existed for several decades, its utility has
not been apparent to many people until the emergence of the World
Wide Web (WWW).
WWW browsers are able to retrieve and present multimedia that the
traditional text-based interface of the Internet could not provide
conveniently.
Consequently the potential of the Internet as a medium for
information transfer, in particular commerce, has been greatly
enhanced.
Unfortunately the Web has inherited all of the familiar security
problems associated with the Internet, and introduced its own
specific problems related to facilitating on-line financial
transactions.
The purpose of this tutorial is to examine security problems related
to the Web, and present the emerging technologies and protocols for
providing secure commercial transactions.
Topics covered in the course include:
- Basic security in Web Servers;
- Introduction to Cryptography;
- Secure servers using S-HTTP and SSL;
- Third party solutions: PGP, PEM, Kerberos;
- Security in IPv6 and the GSS-API; and
- Electronic Payment Systems.
Presenter
Dr. Luke O'Connor first became interested in cryptography and data
security in his honours year in 1985. He continued to work in
these areas throughout his higher degrees, and in 1992 he completed
his PhD, specialising in the design and analysis of block ciphers.
Dr. O'Connor has worked as a security consultant and also as a
programmer of security applications, both in Canada. In 1993 he
took up a position in the security group at the Distributed Systems
Technology Centre in Brisbane, which he now leads. His interests
include encryption systems, cryptographic APIs, smart cards,
electronic commerce and Web/Internet security.
Monday 29 January, 9:30am
Registration Code MA1
This tutorial will introduce and discuss programming languages for parallel and distributed computing systems. The talk begins
with a review of parallel architecture models, and gives a taxonomy
of parallel programming languages.
Then the design choices for such languages will be discussed.
We then introduce the design goals and issues of several
classes of parallel programming languages:
- extensions to sequential languages;
- message-based languages;
- shared-space based languages;
- data-parallel languages;
- parallel logic languages;
- parallel object-oriented languages; and
- parallel functional languages.
Example languages in each class, such as HPF, Ada, Linda, Occam, Orca,
Sisal, PVM, Mentat, Parlog, PCN, and MPI will be described in some
detail, and their usability for real application implementation
will be compared.
Finally, we will discuss future directions of research and
development in the parallel programming area.
The material mainly draws from a collection of papers on parallel programming
languages (D.B. Skillicorn and D. Talia, eds., Programming Languages
for Parallel Processing) published by IEEE Computer Society Press.
Further information about this tutorial is
available at http://www.crai.it/~dot/PLPP.html.
Presenter
Domenico Talia is a senior researcher at CRAI (Consortium
for Research and Applications of Informatics). He is working
in the area of parallel architectures and programming
languages since 1983.
His interests are on parallel computers, concurrent programming
languages, and distributed systems. In particular, he is
interested in the study of tools and operating environments for
highly parallel computing systems.
He presented several tutorials on these topics at international
conferences and workshops. He co-edited the book "Programming
Languages for Parallel Processing" (IEEE Computer Society) and
co-authored the book "Logic Programming and Parallel Architectures"
(Franco Angeli).
He published two books and more than 50 papers in international
journals and conferences proceedings. He is member of the ACM
and the IEEE Computer Society.
Monday 29 January, 9:30am
Registration Code MA2
Most corporate data is text based. This data is typically effectively
hidden from all but the author and the recipients, and
after a short
while may be hidden from all. There is a clear need for document
databases to solve this problem.
This tutorial will discuss three important paradigms for retrieval of
text. It will describe indexing - how documents can be represented in
order to allow retrieval. It will describe some of the issues in
dealing with multimedia documents, which may be very large and have
hypertext links. Examples of document retrieval systems will be
demonstrated. The tutorial will also discuss the retrieval of
documents in the larger context of management of documents. Should
there be requirements imposed on the form of documents? How is security,
versioning, and workflow controlled?
By the end of the tutorial, participants will understand the essentials
of text retrieval, be able to make informed decisions about their own
text retrieval needs, and make that decision in the context of their
wider document management needs.
Presenter
Dr. Ross Wilkinson obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics at Monash University
in 1982. After teaching in the U.S. for two years, he completed a graduate
diploma in computer science at the University of Melbourne
in 1985. After a year at La Trobe University, he
joined the Department of Computer Science at RMIT and has worked there
since. His principal research interests are in the area of document retrieval.
His is interested in the applications of artificial intelligence to document
retrieval, hypertext, and the use of SGML in document retrieval.
Monday 29 January, 2:00pm
Registration Code MP1
Discrete event modelling is basically about using
computers to study systems (engineering systems, biological
systems, transportation systems, software systems, etc), sometimes even
before they are built. It is flexible, it has power to capture
detail about systems and it is cheap. Many discrete event
simulators exist in the commercial domain (see Tanir and Sevinc,
Defining the Requirements for a Standard Simulation Environment,
IEEE Computer, Feb. 1994, pp. 28-34) dedicated specifically to
simulation.
VISP changes this by extending the Microsoft
Visual Basic (VB) software development environment to facilitate
object-based simulation at a minimal cost. The resulting
environment offers graphical and interactive model
building and simulation, graphical debugging, editing and visual
scenario preparation. VISP has interfaces to almost any modern
software application through VB. This high degree of
interconnectivity provides infinite means for simulation report
generation, data acquisition and output analysis.
This tutorial is relevant to anyone who is involved
in decision making and designing systems. People who wish to
be exposed to modelling and simulation are also welcome.
This tutorial covers model development using VISP. We
show step by step how to construct models of moderate
complexity. We also present the concept of "emerging events"
in VISP, a capability which no other discrete event modelling
environment has.
Presenters
Dr. S. Sevinc received a Ph.D. from Arizona in 1988
and currently holds a senior lectureship position at the
University of Sydney. Dr. Sevinc has published widely
and has taught numerous courses to industry in software
development and modelling and simulation. Dr. Sevinc has previously
developed DEVS-CLOS, a discrete event simulator based on Common LISP
Object System. Based on Microsoft Windows and
object-based approach of VB, the VISP environment was
conceived and developed by Dr. Sevinc
over the past few years. A version of the VISP environment
has been funded by DSTO
to be used as a framework for their naval mine warfare modelling
and simulation efforts.
Dr. Sevinc also worked for Microsoft (1991) as a consultant
lecturer and for Czech Technical University, Prague (1995) as
a visiting professor. Dr. Sevinc often works for industry
as a consultant; this includes writing mission sensitive
code, designing software and long term planning of training
of staff and actually training them in relevant technologies.
Dr Kamil Bagde completed a Ph.D. at the University of Yildiz, Turkey, in 1991.
He is a research assistant with the Knowledge Systems Group of the Basser
Department of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. His research
interests are in the area of Discrete Event Modelling and Simulation. He also
has an active interest in practical applications of simulation-based decision
making tools. He is currently working on a research project funded by DSTO to
be used as the framework for their naval mine warfare modelling and simulation
efforts. The emphasis of the project is to provide a visual environment as well
as supporting object-orientation.
Monday 29 January, 2:00pm
Registration Code MP2
Text compression is employed in a variety of applications.
It is used to economise on disk storage, in the form of general
purpose systems such as GZip, as well as in on-the-fly disk doubling
systems.
It is also used to improve the performance of communication systems
by reducing the amount of data being transmitted.
Huffman coding is a traditional method of compression, but other
approaches such as arithmetic coding and Ziv-Lempel coding have
become popular in the last decade.
This tutorial provides an introduction to the subject of text
compression, and, more generally, methods for lossless compression of
sequences.
Key ideas in compression will be introduced, including modelling,
entropy, Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, Ziv-Lempel coding, and
adaptive modelling.
Standard methods such as Compress and Gzip will be described in
detail, and some lesser known powerful techniques, such as PPM and
DMC, will also be examined.
Finally, the performance of various techniques will be compared.
Presenters
Dr. Tim Bell received B.Sc.(hons) and Ph.D. degrees from
the University of Canterbury in 1984 and 1987 respectively.
He held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary (Canada)
during 1987/88, before moving to a permanent appointment at
the University of Canterbury, where he is now a Senior Lecturer.
His interests include data compression, computers and music,
and teaching computer science to young children.
He has co-authored two books - Text Compression
(Prentice Hall, 1990, co-authored with J. Cleary and I.H. Witten) and
Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents
and Images (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994, co-authored with
I.H. Witten and A. Moffat) - as well as
numerous papers
on data compression.
He is on the program committee of the IEEE
Data Compression Conference.
Dr. Ian H. Witten is Professor of
Computer Science at the University of Waikato,
New Zealand.
He received degrees in Mathematics from Cambridge University,
Computer Science from the University of Calgary, and Electrical
Engineering from Essex University.
A Lecturer at Essex from 1970, he returned to Calgary in 1980 where
he served as Head of Computer Science for three years.
In 1992 he moved to New Zealand and took up a chair at Waikato
University.
His research interests include text and image compression;
programming by demonstration; and digital libraries; and he directs a
large project at Waikato on machine learning and its application to
agriculture.
He has published around 150 refereed papers and six books, including
Text Compression (Prentice Hall, 1990, co-authored with T.
Bell and J. Cleary) and Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents
and Images (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994, co-authored with A. Moffat
and T. Bell).
Tuesday 30 January, 9:30am
Registration Code TA1
The successful uses of databases has been based on the notion that there is
a strict methodology for their construction.
Persistent programming research has for some time concentrated on
integrating the concepts of both programming languages and databases. This
tutorial will review the state of persistent programming systems in
relation to the manner in which they control the complexity of building
long-lived, data-intensive application systems, taking the approach that
meta-data, data and programs have equal status.
The tutorial will review the approaches to uniformity and incrementality
available to persistent application system designers. A liberal use of
examples will be used to illustrate the concepts. It will also include a
new technique for of programming called hyper-programming which is only
possible in integrated persistent systems.
Presenters
Professor
Ron Morrison holds the Chair of Software Engineering at the University of St
Andrews. He gained a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Strathclyde
in 1967, a Diploma in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow in
1968, an MSc in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow in 1970
and a PhD from the University of St Andrews in 1979. His special interests
are programming language design, persistent object systems and operating
systems.
Professor Morrison is currently a director of the ESPRIT III BRA 6903 Fide2
project on Database Programming Languages,
and gave an invited tutorial on
persistent programming at the 19th VLDB Conference in Chile.
He is a regular attendee and
contributor to ACSC.
Dr. Richard Connor has been working in the field of persistent and database
programming language technology for around ten years, and has over 35
refereed publications in these areas.
He graduated with an honours degree in 1985,
and completed a Ph.D. ("Types and
Polymorphism in Persistent Programming Systems") in 1991.
In 1994 Dr Connor was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowhip to
investigate enhanced static analysis mechanisms in persistent programming
systems.
The persistent programming research group at St Andrews University is
widely recognised as one of the major worldwide influences in persistent
technology research.
Tuesday 30 January, 9:30am
Registration Code TA2
Like text compression, image compression is widely used for both storage and
transmission of images.
There is a wide variety in the kind of images that information
systems must accommodate: black and white, greyscale, and color. This tutorial
will cover the compression of images with an emphasis on bilevel document
images and lossless compression. Attendance at the previous tutorial on "Text
compression" is helpful but not essential.
We will begin by surveying image types, and quickly move on to CCITT Groups 3
and 4 compression, which is the standard way that fax machines represent images
for transmission. These are being superseded by a recently-introduced standard
for bilevel images, JBIG, which uses a context-based method of compression. We
will treat context-based image compression in general, and the JBIG method in
particular. JBIG also uses progressive transmission based on a non-obvious
technique for resolution reduction, which will also be covered. We will then
move to the JPEG standard for transmitting grey-scale and colour photographic
images, and discuss different methods for progressive transmission. Returning
to bilevel images, we will look at recently-developed methods of textual image
compression which are likely to form the basis of future standards. We will
finish with a comparison of the compression performance achieved
by the different compression methods.
Presenters
Professor Ian H. Witten and Dr. Tim Bell, as for the tutorial
Text Compression.
Tuesday 30 January, 2:00pm
Registration Code TP1
The first part of our tutorial introduces real-time systems, explains
why real-time computing is important to our society, discusses the
design of real-time systems, and reviews what has been done in this
area.
The second part discusses implementation strategy using two
approaches: general message-passing to cooperating processes which are
executing on different workstations; and distributed shared memory
(DSM) for parallel computing.
In the third part of our tutorial we discuss, as a case study, the
problem of real-time imaging.
We give a summary of commonly used vision algorithms and their
parallel solutions.
We then introduce our hierarchical object recognition system as an
example of parallel implementation using network of workstations by
either message-passing or distributed shared memory.
We will demonstrate our experimental results and compare with the
traditional methods.
Finally, we outline the potential applications of our methodology to
other areas such as speech recognition, machine learning, neural
networks, robotics and real-time database.
Presenters
Dr. Jane You obtained a B.Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering in 1986,
and graduated from La Trobe University with a Ph.D degree in Computer
Science in 1992.
In 1994 she was awarded a French Foreign Ministry International
Post-doctoral Fellowship and was a member of a project of real-time object
recognition in aerial images using multi-processors at Universite Paris XI.
Her research interests include image processing, computer vision,
parallel processing and distributed systems. She has had over 30 research
papers published in international journals and conference proceedings.
In 1996 she will take up a post at Griffith University.
Dr. Weiping Zhu has many years of research and working experience in Computer
Science especially in Computer Networks and Distributed Systems. He used to
be lecturer, software engineer and consultant in China. He spent one year as
a research scholar working on distributed systems at University of Newcastle
upon Tyne, UK. He concentrated his research interest on distributed systems
and networks towards his Ph.D during 1988-1992 at UNSW.
During the past five years he has had more than 25 research papers and
technical reports published.
Tuesday 30 January, 2:00pm
Registration Code TP2
alistair / csse.unimelb.edu.au,
30 October 1995.