Linda Stern

Contact

Postal:
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
University of Melbourne
Melbourne 3010 Australia
Email: linda -at- csse.unimelb.edu.au
Phone:
+61 3 8344 1300 (Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering)
Fax: +61 3 9348 1184
Physical location:
Office, Room 5.33
ICT Building
111 Barry St.
Melbourne, Victoria 3010
Australia

Current Research

My research interests are in bioinformatics and in computer science education, particularly development and evaluation of on-line resources.

Bioinformatics

My primary interest is in detecting patterns in DNA and RNA sequences and structures.

Work done with Ross Hall uses Fourier analysis to detect features in both coding and non-coding DNA. See abstract of our paper in Bioinformatics. More recent work involves detection of non-coding RNA families.

Work done in collaboration with Lloyd Allison and Trevor Dix at Monash University uses an approximate repeat model of DNA to discover patterns of interest. Text compression techniques are used to assess how well the model fits the sequence. See abstracts of our papers in Computers and Chemistry, Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology, and BMC Bioinformatics 2007.

I have written a software tool for automated detection of outbreaks of food-borne gastroenteritis that is currently in routine use in the National Enteric Pathogen Surveillance Scheme. A study showing the effectiveness of this tool, in reported in our paper in Epidemiology and Infection.

Computing education

I am primarily interested in the development of on-line learning resources and in the evaluation of these resources from an educational perspective.

One focus of my work in computing education has been the development of the animation learning tool Algorithms in Action (see below). A more recent development is e-Bridges for Computer Science , a web-based framework for presenting and cross-referencing computer science resources.

A current interest is evaluation of open-ended educational software using agent-oriented modelling techniques (see below).

Research Students

Ross Hall has completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Mathematical Sciences is now enrolled in a Masters program. His interests are computational gene-finding, modelling of DNA sequences, and visual representations of biological data.
Antonette Mendoza is investigating the ways in which users appropriate educational technologies. Her Ph.D. is being co-supervised by Dr. Jennie Carroll.
Ioanna Ioannou is developing a virtual environment for tooth drilling, designed to assist dental students in learning to distinguish the feel of different biological materials as they drill. Her M.Sc. is being co-supervised by Dr. Ed Kazmierczak.
Zuiena Hussain is modelling student learning strategies for her honours thesis.
Bret Talko has completed his Masters' thesis, entitled ``A Rule-Based Approach for Constructing Neural Networks Using Genetic Programming''

Algorithms in Action

I lead the ``Algorithms in Action'' project, which has been running since 1998, with the generous support of the Teaching and Learning Committie (Multimedia and Educational Technologies) Committee of The University of Melbourne. Ongoing development uses animation and web-based technology to support student learning of algorithms. Collaborators are Lee Naish and Harald Sondergaard. Students who have worked on the project include Wally Beer, Nick Burgers, Ka-Chi Cheung, Doug English, Andrew Graham, George Kong, and Mei Khing Ong.

A preliminary report in ITiCSE99 is available, and a more recent report at SIGCSE 2002. However, it is much more fun just to run the AIA demonstration. The full system is available to educators on request.

My keynote presentation "Multimedia in the Computer Science Classroom", delivered at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges of the Northeastern Conference, Providence, Rhode Island (USA) in April 2003, addresses more general issues in educational multimedia, using algorithm animation as a case study.

Evaluation of Educational Software

An invited seminar "Evaluating Teaching Innovations" presented to the Computer Education Research Group of Monash University in August 2004 addresses general issues about evaluating educational multimedia, and talks about evaluating AIA withinin the framework of the PEDANT project.

The PEDANT framework provides a general method for evaluating learning tools from an educational perspective. Based on agent-oriented modelling techniques, the framework supports automation of evaluation of educational software.

We have used AIA as a test application for testing the PEDANT ideas and framework. More about the intersection of the AIA and PEDANT projects can be found in our paper presented at ITiCSE05 (Portugal), a presentation at the Biomedical Multimedia Unit in 2005, and our papers presented at ED-MEDIA 2006 (USA), ED-MEDIA 2007 (USA), and ED-MEDIA 2008 (Vienna).

Teaching

In 2011 I am teaching:
COMP 90016 Computational Genomics (semester 1)
COMP 90014 Algorithms for Functional Genomics (semester 2)
INFO 20001 Informatics 3 (semesters 1 and 2)

Teaching Awards

2007 Teaching Excellence Aware, Faculty of Engineering, University of Melbourne
1999 Teaching Excellence Aware, Faculty of Engineering, University of Melbourne
1999 Kelvin Medal, Faculty of Engineering, University of Melbourne

Student Research Projects

The following projects are available in our kidney modelling project:
Data dimensionality reduction
Neighborhood analysis for parallel computing
Modelling solute transport in the kidney

Computational Genomics projects can be developed according to the student's interest.

dChip data

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