Workshops

Eating frogs, getting things done, juggling elephants... and other thoughts on Time Management

Tim Bell, University of Canterbury

If you've been meaning to find out about time management, but haven't been able to find the ...errrr... time to do so, here's your chance!

Time management isn't about being a robot sticking to some inflexible plan (homework: watch Clockwise http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090852/, starring John Cleese.) Time management is about developing habits to help you achieve your professional AND personal goals. We'll trade cool ideas that people use to achieve this.

Research Career

Stephen Marsland, Massey University

A recent article in The Economist states `There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings.' (16th December 2010, The disposable academic) In this workshop I will give you a view of a possible career pathway from the lucky end of the spectrum (i.e., a university lecturer) and point out some of the many other places that a computer science PhD can take you to. If pushed I'll speculate on what might help you be one of the lucky ones, provided you promise not to place too much trust in my opinion.

The Publication Game

Ian Witten, University of Waikato

Research is fun ... fun that we take very seriously! ... seriously enough that we want to tell others about what we have discovered. But unfortunately most scientific writing is cr@p! What you can do about it? Why publish? Publish where? How? Write that book ... or not? So many questions.

How to Create An Effective Research Poster

Alex Potanin, Victoria University of Wellington

In this workshop attendees will be expected to actively participate in critiquing a number of representative posters. At the end, everyone would be expected to have a list of agreed upon guidelines that would help them create a good poster in the future. If time permits, everyone would be given a chance to create a quick outline of a poster there and then to show off their thesis topic.

Industry v.s. Academia

Jens Dietrich, Massey University

I will talk of academic-industry collaboration using examples from my own background: I have worked in industry for several years after finishing my PhD, kept on doing consulting projects after returning to academia and have supervised numerous student projects sponsored by industry. I will try to point out what works and what doesn’t, and discuss some “collaboration patterns”.

Presentation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Hans Guesgen, Massey University

Now that you have achieved all these wonderful research results and have built that super-efficient universal computer system that can achieve world peace in polynomial time, what are you going to do next? You are going to tell your partner, your friends, your colleagues, your school, your university, and the whole world about it - and there is plenty of opportunity for computer scientists to do so. You can sign up to give a talk in your local seminar series, or you can submit a paper to a conference and present there - the choice is yours. The only problem is that you have to stand in front of a crowd of strangers and tell them within a limited time period what you have achieved. And this is usually where disaster strikes and things go terribly wrong, leaving you with the wish to hide as quickly as possible after your talk in the darkest corner of the world. This workshop tries to shed some light on what can go wrong during presentations, major mistakes you can make, and how to avoid them.

How to write a coherent thesis in less than 5 years

Dr Giovanni Moretti

For most of a PhD, writing a thesis seems way in the future and can be safely ignored. As end looms, you're faced with a vast amount of information, some of which you're the expert in, that you have to turn into a thesis. Transforming a cloud of related ideas in your head into linear written form can be daunting, and oddly, being the expert can be part of the problem. This workshop will focus methods, tips and techniques that have been found to be useful.

Unlimited Realities Workshop

David Brebner and Ben Wilde

A talk with Unlimited Realities about their research and development in computer graphics, HCI and language design.