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ICT stalwart strives for better education, research

Peter Davidson, Information Age

18/03/2005 14:45:26

Not many nine-year-old girls would saunter up to the looming bulk of SILLIAC at its first public showing, play it at noughts and crosses, beat it - and get hooked on computing for the rest of her extraordinary life.

But the pre-teen Jenny Edwards was already sufficiently immersed in mathematics to be fascinated by one of Australia's first automatic computers, which had been built in Prof John Bennett's fledgling Basser Laboratory in 1956.

Invited to see SILIIAC by her paediatrician father, who was connected with Sydney University, she recalls that she didn't know much about computers: "nobody did, but I was pleased that I had beaten it, not that it's hard to win at noughts and crosses".

She didn't realise that her youthful victory over SILLIAC would later see her deeply involved in its more scientific functions - and its eventual demise in the late-60s.

Science and maths were her priority at school, triggered in part by moving to a desk which happened to have some graffiti ("unusual at my school") on it: ei = -1

The Euler Formula had her stumped: "I knew that pi was an interesting number, but didn't know what 'e' or 'i' represented. But I was determined to find out." So she did.

On her way to an ambition as a maths teacher, she joined the University Mathematics Society, and joined a number of friends in it at a week-long interest course run for the society at Basser during B.Sc studies.

"It was fun, but in those days computing was not available until third year. But I waited, did numerical analysis for B.Sc honours, got a scholarship and pressed on.

"I worked always on the mathematical side and numerical analysis has remained my principal interest."

John Bennett supervised her Master's thesis which she completed in 1972, and her PhD which although she started it then, was not completed until 1991. "It was finished, but I didn't get around to typing it up."

The Basser years were marked by constant traffic in computing and mathematical luminaries through it: "John Bennett was the driving force behind the department, encouraging those from other universities and organisations to use SILLIAC's computing power to appreciate the potential of the new technology.

"He always had a flood of visitors, and I was able to meet people like Maurice Wilkes, Leslie Fox, Jim Wilkinson, Frank and Ailsa Land, Sandy Douglas and Chris Wallace during my time there."

It was a time too of innovation, like the creation of a heterogeneous LAN formed by linking SILLIAC, the KDF9 (SILLIAC's English-Electric-built successor) and several other machines.

"SILLIAC was able to play music of a sort, and I programmed it to play Chopin's Death March which it duly performed at its decommissioning party during my Honours year in 1968.

"It was a big affair: SILLIAC with its 1K of memory had worked hard, particularly on calculations for projects like the Snowy Mountains scheme, and a lot of the people involved in its various projects were there.

"Harry Messel took the last two bottles of beer out of SILLIAC's cooler ("such a suitably Australian innovation") to share with the technicians, postgrad and honours students at their own party downstairs.

"It was a better event than the posh party upstairs and a lot of them drifted down to us. I was fortunate to have been involved in such an important stage in computing development, even more so to have been there for what I think was SILLIAC's first public outing, and its last."

Her qualifications in mathematical programming were in demand as a teacher, but also a consultant, working for a host of Australian icon companies like Arnott's, BHP and the PMG (now Telstra).

Sydney's Australia Square building, in its heyday a national landmark, stands partly because of her contribution to its structural engineering.

"For the others, it was programming to deduce investment efficiencies - you need to know that a blast furnace will work, and how well, before you commit to building it.

"In the PMG's case, it was planning how to run the optic fibre cable it wanted to install around Australia; their cable couldn't bend and there had to be a right way to design the network."

But teaching had always been her primary passion and she started her academic teaching career at Sydney University, going later to UTS in 1976. She became its Head of the School of Computer Sciences in 1994, a post she held until 2000.

She is now Professor of Information Technology at UTS.

Untrained teachers, few women Like many of those who have left a footprint on Australian ICT, she has been concerned about issues as much as technology. In her case, a commitment to education has drawn her energies into such things as falling ICT student enrolments, encouraging women into ICT, the lack of skilled teachers, and research quality.

"There are not enough students taking on ICT as a career, and just as our industry seems to be picking up we are going to face some serious skill supply problems soon.

"It's a difficult thing to change attitudes, but parents must encourage their kids into ICT, as they, and governments, do in places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Many people think that ICT is just Word and Web sites, ignorant of the skill that goes into creating a site - there's a database behind it, someone has to work out the data flow and so it goes on.

"We have to show that ICT is an enabling profession which underpins many others, not just a discipline in isolation. Kids want to do law, humanities and the like - they never see someone trendy in the soaps that they watch on TV using computing to solve problems unlike the forensic types fiddling with body parts who have created a demand for forensic science.

"Word processing and spreadsheets are useful skills but that's not all there is, and we as an industry are to blame for the nerdy image with the computing archetype looking like a bit player from Gladiator, all beard and sandals.

"ICT professionals talk to people to understand their problems, go away to find solutions, run them through a computer and take the answers back. It's challenging and it's fun. But we don't portray that."

Poorly qualified teachers in schools add to the problem, so do badly devised syllabuses she says: "Virtually no school teachers know what happens with ICT in the real world, few have been trained to teach ICT properly and even fewer have a background in computing.

"In NSW particularly, the computer teacher may have previously been teaching woodwork; teacher training is a major issue."

The same shortcomings also contribute to the lack of women in ICT, discouraged by the same images and educational problems. While "a cultural problem in the Western world", she hopes that a summit to address the female shortage, scheduled for mid-year by Communications Minister Sen Helen Coonan, will generate effective publicity on the problem if nothing else.

"Those of us who have been working to get women into ICT have found that any initiative to do so usually results in getting more men as well, just because there's a proper effort being made to show the interesting side of computing and promote it as a career."

As president of CORE, an association of computing departments (previously the Computer Science Association), she has concerns at the administrative level of tertiary education. As a convocation of departments rather than individuals, it represents about two-thirds of all universities in Australia and New Zealand.

It exists as a collaborative body which while meeting only once a year, offers continuing communication between heads of departments and professors to discuss issues of common interest.

Research quality CORE is carefully watching developments in the student recruitment issues mentioned earlier, but particularly moves to examine research quality.

In May last year, the Prime Minister announced the creation of a Research Quality Framework to examine and assess the quality and impact of research in universities and publicly-funded agencies in Australia.

The move follows similar projects to measure performance and accountability in the UK, elsewhere in the OECD and most recently in New Zealand. All have created some consternation in the academic community.

The NZ exercise sought to compare the performance of researchers, department by department, university to university on the premise that the number of published papers in refereed journals, citations given by those journals and internationally recognised awards to researchers may not represent a valid assessment of research quality.

Given that NZ has only two medical schools, one dentistry school and architecture school, Alan Consulting, retained to conduct the survey, found that comparative data were slim indeed.

The expert panel established to consider submissions to the Australian research framework is chaired by Prof Sir Gareth Roberts, who led the UK examination of research assessment and was formerly vice chancellor of Sheffield University.

For Edwards, the process as outlined in Australia is fraught: "For many years, computer research has been measured in terms of published articles. The difficulty with that is that in ICT things move so quickly, and because it may take two years to get something published development in a particular field has moved on significantly.

"People can get material informally published on a Web site quickly, further clouding the process when assessments are made. It's a very big issue in terms of university promotions."

She contends that people looking at research should have a thorough understanding of the things that are important to the computing industry at large, and that papers presented at high quality refereed conferences should also be considered, equally, with journal papers.

"Getting a paper accepted for a reputable conference is often harder than convincing a publisher of its worth; many IEEE conferences for example have about a 15 per cent acceptance rate. But again, because of the fast rate of change in our profession, those that are delivered are sometimes more timely and therefore more cogent."

If a department is downgraded through research assessment, then people will not get ARC grants, she says. That combined with falling ICT student numbers will mean less research, depleted staff and a high teaching load on those that remain, doing little to raise the academic bar for new ICT graduates.

She should know about the testing standards applied to conference papers, having been involved for years in the programming of papers at many conferences, and the editing of proceedings at the Australasian Computer Science Conference which she chaired for three years.

As the author of a long list of published articles and conference papers, some co-authored with such heavyweights as John Bennett, Michael Hall, John Debenham and John Tomlin, she has delivered her findings to conferences around the world, in reports to industry and to government.

Her work and interest in things mathematical sees her actively involved in the Australian Society for Operations research (ASOR) and its international equivalent INFORMS, the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) and the Mathematical Programming Society.

She is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society.