I am a member of the
Distributed High Performance
Computing group
in the School of Computer Science at Adelaide.
My primary research interest is program improvement, specifically
the application of rewriting techniques in the
the optimisation and parallelisation of programming
languages.
Xurrent work is focused on the optimisation and targetting of
programs in a point-free subset
of Bird-Meertens Formalism (BMF). I am currently recasting the prototype
implementation described in my
thesis to
Stratego.
This new implementation is constructed from simple normalisation and
transformation modules and heavily exploits rewriting strategies supported
by Stratego. A prototype implementation of an array vectorization phase
of the compiler has been built and work is currently underway to formally
verify its correctness.
Preliminary work is also underway to map point-free BMF to FPGA architectures.
We are also running projects to apply heuristic search techniques to the
optimisation of simple point-free programs and, eventually, to the
construction of a compiler.
I am also involved in small projects applying grammatical evolution
to the composition of programs in point-free-form,
the composition of transformation modules in a compiler and the
composition of financial contracts.
Work related to Thesis
The work related to my thesis forms part of the Adl project.
A short description of the project and some related publications
is given at the end of this link .
Honours/Masters projects
A list of Honours/Masters project proposals can be found
at the end of this link.
Education Research
I am keenly interested in improving the quality of Computer Science
education, in particular, the development of problem solving skills.
I am one of the investigators in a project, funded by Google, to
promote the use of problem solving on Computer Science. I am also
one of the investigators in a University of Adelaide project to
improve and promulgate our school's
web-based automatic marking and assessment
system.
I am a current member of the Education Research Group of Adelaide (ERGA) and have recently completed
the Graduate Certificate
in Higher Education course offered at Adelaide. My main areas of interest
are Competititive Learning, Automated Assessment, Plagiarism Detection, and
the use of version-control systems. I am interested in establishing
collaborative links on these, and related, topics. I am currently working
on the use of genetic algorithms for grouping students on the basis of diagnostic assessments.
The University of Adelaide
