About The School
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
The University of New South Wales was established in 1949. At the main campus in Kensington, six kilometres south east of the centre of Sydney, there are the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, Built Environment, Commerce and Economics, Engineering, Law, Science, and Medicine together with the Australian Graduate School of Management. The College of Fine Arts of the University of New South Wales is located in the inner Sydney suburb of Paddington. A University College of the University of New South Wales, located within the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, provides tertiary education for officer cadets and officers of the three services of the Australian Defence Force and postgraduate education and research for military personnel and civilians. The University痴 total enrolled head count in 2002 was 40,320 students.
For further information on UNSW, visit our website at http://www.unsw.edu.au/
THE FACULTY OF ENGINEERING
The Faculty of Engineering is the largest in Australia and comprises of nine Schools, viz. the Schools of Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, Geomatic Engineering, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Mining Engineering and Petroleum Engineering.
For further information on the Faculty, visit our website at http://www.eng.unsw.edu.au/
THE SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
The School of Computer Science and Engineering was founded in 1991 out of the former Department of Computer Science within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It is now one of the largest Schools within the University, and one of the largest of its kind in Australia. It currently has 58 full-time academic staff and 45 support staff. The School also employs a large number of part-time and casual teaching staff to support teaching and teaching administration. The academic staff have research focus in the following areas; Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Representation and Reasoning; Database Systems; Network Research Laboratory; Operating Systems; Compilers and Distributed Computing; Computer Vision and Image Processing; Formal Methods in Software Engineering; Empirical Methods in Software Engineering; Human Computer Interaction; Reconfigurable Architectures and Algorithms and Embedded Systems.
TEACHING ACTIVITIES OF THE SCHOOL
The School has a student body of approximately 4000 undergraduate students, more than 2500 of these majoring in a computing degree, over 350 postgraduate coursework students, 140+ PhD and Masters by Research students.
Undergraduate Programs
The School offers four undergraduate degrees:
- BE (Computer Engineering) ｭ a four-year degree offered in collaboration with the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications.
- BE (Software Engineering) ｭ a four-year degree offered in collaboration with the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management.
- BSc (Computer Science), a three-year degree with optional Honours year.
- BE (Bioinformatics), a four-year degree offered in collaboration with the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.
The School also offers a number of combined degrees with Science, Arts and Commerce and a concurrent five year degree leading to the award of the Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering and Master of Biomedical Engineering (BE/MBiomedE). During 2000, the School began offering a combined five year program in Bachelor of Engineering and BSc in Computer Science. This combined program allows students to combine a BE in a traditional Engineering discipline with an undergraduate degree in Computing.
Honours in the BE program is awarded on the basis of superior performance over the complete course. Honours in the BSc degree is awarded after completing an honours year. All BE students and all BSc (Honours) students in the School must produce a major report (thesis) on a project that they have undertaken in their final year. The project occupies a substantial part of that year and can be of research quality.
In addition, the School offers the Computer Science Co-op Fastrack Program which is an industry-sponsored scholarship computer science program incorporating three semesters of industrial training. Entry to this specialised program is competitive and is by additional application and interview.
All BE students must complete sixty days Industrial Training.
The School has a reputation of producing graduates with solid experience with projects of significant size. It encourages top undergraduate students to join research groups and contribute to their work.
There are approximately 1,168 equivalent full-time students enrolled in the School痴 programs. Consistently, the School attracts more than 200 students each year with a NSW University Admission Index (UAI) of 95 or higher.
The School encourages its students to participate in international competitions. Some of the recent successes are:
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest
Three different teams from UNSW, all coached by Hossam ElGindy, won the South-Pacific Regional Championship at the Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for three consecutive years since 2001, and were ranked 11th, 11th and 21st in the world respectively. The ICPC is the premier programming competition in the world for university students in which over 2000 teams from 70 countries participate anually.
RoboCup
RoboCup is a unique brand of soccer based on robotics and artificial intelligence and aims to advance research in robotics by sharing the research outcomes at the end of each year competition. A UNSW student team has won the ''Sony legged league'' of the international RoboCup competition two years in a row (2000 and 2001) and came second in 1999, its first year in the competition. In 2001, UNSW beat Carnegie Mellon University to retain the title. In 2002 UNSW came second in the International Championships. In 2003, UNSW not only won the Robocup Legged League Australian Open Final but also the International Championships held in Italy during July 2003. Twenty-four teams from universities and research laboratories around the world competed in the finals for the honour of being the world champions.
Postgraduate Programs
The School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of New South Wales is one of the largest and finest of its kind in Australasia. We offer postgraduate coursework programs of study to cater for a range of backgrounds, from graduates with no computing background who wish to broaden their knowledge as IT professionals through to Computer Science or Information Technology graduates who wish to undertake advanced computing study and/or get up-to-date with the latest trends.
CSE is the top IT research school in Australia and offers leading-edge courses delivered by top-class academics. Students will find themselves immersed in an active and exciting research environment, where the next generation of IT is being developed.
Unique among Universities in the Sydney basin, CSE@UNSW offers a number of cutting edge advanced courses taught by experts from National ICT Australia, the research institute recently funded by Australia's Federal Government.
CSE also has a strong commitment to research, with focus in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Computer Architecture, Computer Systems, Database Systems, Networks & Software Engineering. It is complimented with high quality research facilities. Appropriate qualifications are necessary for admission into research programs, however it may be possible to undertake a minor research project in one of several masters programs.
The School offers an extensive range of coursework programs:
- Master of Information Technology
- Master of Computing and Information Technology
- Graduate Diploma in Computing and Information Technology
- Graduate Certificate in Computing
- Graduate Certificate in Advanced Compuing
In the masters and graduate diploma programs, students are permitted to major in one of the following areas:
- Autonomous Systems
- Bioinformatics
- Database Systems
- e-Commerce Systems
- Internetworking
- Knowledge Systems and Data Mining
Master of Information Technology is a specialised one year full-time degree for students with a four year degree in computing. Master of Computing and Information Technology (and GradDip CIT) is a two year full-time (1.5 years full-time for GradDip CIT) broadening degree in Computing targeted to three-year and four-year degree holders in Science and Engineering (or a discipline that covered second year mathematics), intending a career change to Computing. The equivalent of approximately 250 full-time students are enrolled in the School’s postgraduate coursework programs.
The School's active research program is supported by students working for the PhD and Masters by Research degrees. There are 157 equivalent full-time students enrolled in the School’s research degree programs. Several Faculty Scholarships are available to research students in addition to the Australian Postgraduate Awards (APA) and International Postgraduate Research Scholarships (IPRS).
The School is active in a diverse range of research areas.
The School is also the largest research partner in the newly established Cooperative Research Centre for Smart Internet Technology. This CRC for Smart Internet Technology combines research in Artificial Intelligence Networks and Software Engineering to build smart Internet applications. The CRC enables collaboration on cutting edge projects with partners such as Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and Telstra.
The School is also host to the Centre for Advanced Software Engineering Research (CAESER). CAESER is formed from the expertise developed within the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management. CAESER acts as a focus for software engineering research in Australia. It is an internationally linked Centre of Excellence in the collaborative advancement and practice of software engineering.
The School also collaborates with the UNSW College of Fine Arts in the newly established Centre for Interactive Cinema (iCinema). This Centre aims to foster research in various aspects of entertainment technology.
The various research themes in the School and some of their activities are described here.
The School has well-equipped computer laboratories for coursework teaching and student projects, including a number of specialist laboratories. In total there exists a network of close to 500 computers for teaching, research and administration. This consists of:
-
284 mostly Intel-based computers in 15 generic teaching laboratories running Solaris or Linux,
-
20 computers in an NT-based teaching lab,
-
50 Solaris/Linux computers reserved for thesis students,
-
50 computers in specialist teaching laboratories (see below),
-
30 locally developed research machines of various kinds,
-
150 systems of various hardware and software configurations for academic staff and research students,
-
50 computers for administration and systems support,
-
20 Unix-based servers (Intel, Digital, Sun and SGI hardware),
-
a 17-node Linux cluster for research,
-
a 18-node Linux cluster for teaching.
The School operates a wireless network for use by staff and students, In addition the School operates a modem pool for staff and senior students and provides a limited amount of free access to the University's dial-up facility to coursework students.
The School is committed to regular upgrades of its facilities, and invests over $1million per year on equipment replacement.
A number of staff and students are active and well-known within the Open Source Community. The current maintainer of Linux NFS is a member of the School (and Linux NFS is run on production file servers).
The specialist teaching laboratories are:
The Microprocessor Projects Laboratory has three high performance PCs for software development and CAD, and 6PCs which can act as hosts for a variety of other equipment (e.g. transputer boards, multimedia equipment, communications, and robotics interfaces). This lab is equipped with a network of 30 MC68008-based laboratory computers and an M69030-based server, interconnected in a robust local area network.
The Advanced Systems Teaching Laboratory comprises of 16 Unix hosts connected via a network whose topology and outside connectivity can be controlled by a dedicated switch/router. Each host is connected to a U4600, a MIPS R4700-based 64-bit computer. The systems were designed and built within the School and run a locally developed micro-kernel based operating system. A kernel development environment runs on the Unix hosts. The laboratory is used to teach Advanced Operating Systems, Advanced Networks and Real-time Systems.
The Human Computer Interaction Laboratory is equipped with 20 high-powered Macintosh workstations and is used to teach aspects of interface design
There are a number of special research facilities:
The Network Research Laboratory is equipped with state of the art commercial ATM Switches, High Speed Routers, Ethernet Switches and several experimental FreeBSD/Linux based routers and commercial test equipment. It is used for research in the areas of Quality of Service Management in the Internet: Differentiated Services Network, Multimedia transmission in the Internet, Pricing and Billing of Services in the Internet, Web performance management and mobile/wireless protocols.
The Distributed Operating Systems Laboratory features a number of U4600's, MIPS-based SGI workstations and single- and multiprocessor Alpha machines as well as a number of locally-developed StongARM-based wearable computers called PLEB. The facility is used for research in Microkernels and microkernel-based systems, operating systems for 64-bit architectures, operating system support for distributed and ubiquitous computing and scalable operating systems for symmetric multiprocessor architectures.
The Robotics Laboratory has a growing collection of robots to support research and student projects in robotics. The laboratory currently has a number of Sony Pets (quadruped robots built by Sony Corp), Pioneers (wheeled robots with video, sonar, laser range finders and wireless ethernet running Linux), CURI (wheeled robot with two cameras running Linux), Fander (wheeled robot with sonar and bump sensors), Stumpy (a six-legged walking robot for research on reinforcement learning), the SCORBOT mechanical arm, etc.
The Visual Information Processing Laboratory contains a number of high-performance SGI workstations for image processing and indexing research.
The PCB Prototyping Facility supports the fabrication of printed circuit boards with up to six layers for a number of research activities.
The Human Computer Interaction Facility supports human-computer-interaction as well as behavioural studies in a visually and acoustically controlled environment.
An alternative fibre-based high-speed network links the School's research and teaching facilities, which is used for networking, distributed systems research as well as for experiments in alternative teaching methods
|
