Panel: Post PhD/Masters, what are your options?

• Date: Tuesday 13 April 2010
• Time: 1730-1830
• Location: MCLT101, Kelburn Campus

The basic idea behind this panel discussion is to bring together people who have completed a PhD or a Masters degree and with a broad range of different careers who talk about their career decisions, day-to-day professional life, and career options.

We are very pleased to have the following panelists:

	Neal Glew Job Title: Senior Staff Researcher, Intel, Santa Clara, CA, USA PhD: Low-Level Type Systems for Modularity and Object-Oriented Constructs (Cornell University, 2000) Research Interests: Functional languages and parallel programming models. Bio: Neal was born and grew up in Wellington. In 1990 he went to Victoria University of Wellington and studied for a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics and then a BSc(hons) in Computer Science, which he completed in 1993. In 1994 he went to Cornell University to study for a PhD in Computer Science. He worked with Dexter Kozen and Greg Morrisett on Typed Assembly Language and graduated in 2000. He went to StarLab, a research lab, of InterTrust Technologies Corporation in April 2000 and worked on tools for obfuscating software and aspects of secure email. He left InterTrust in late 2001 and started at Intel Corporation's Programming System Lab in May 2002. At Intel he has worked on Java Virtual Machines, formal specification of the instruction set architecture, and a compiler for a parallel functional programming language.
	Toby Hawker Job Title: Software Engineer, Google, Sydney, Australia PhD: Large Scale Resources for Word Sense Disambiguation (University of Sydney, 2009) Research Interests: Natural Language Processing, Word Sense Disambiguation, Language Modeling, Machine Learning Bio: Toby is originally from Masterton, in the lower North Island, and having lived in Australia for a long time, is now generally accused of having the accent from the opposite side of the Tasman to where he is. For a while he dabbled in telecommunications development and then cognitive science research, including the delivery of large magnetic pulses to student volunteers' brains. Toby did his PhD on Word Sense Disambiguation at the University of Sydney. He now works on Google Wave in Sydney, and has the extra responsibility of playing guitar to entertain the team in any dull parts of meetings.
	Alyona Medelyan Job Title: Software Engineer (R&D), Pingar LP, Auckland (also Conference Chair of NZCSRSC 2007) PhD: Human-competitive automatic topic indexing (University of Waikato, 2009) Research interests: Text Mining, Wikipedia Mining, Semantics, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval. Bio: Originally from Crimea (Ukraine), Alyona got her Masters degree from Freiburg University, one of the oldest in Germany. She attended a variety of courses from medieval German linguistics to Artificial Intelligence, but has always concentrated on the field of Natural Language Processing. An exchange semester in New Zealand convinced her that University of Waikato would be a great place to do a PhD, which she completed this year. During her studies, Alyona worked in an IT start-up, a research institute and completed an internship at Google. Now she works for the company Pingar, New Zealand's answer to search technologies. Apart from attending conferences (this is her fourth NZCSRSC), Alyona's hobbies include travelling, yoga, painting and fire pois.
	Gordon Paynter Job Title: Programme Manager for Digitisation and Senior Application Developer, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington PhD: Automating Iterative Tasks with Programming by Demonstration (University of Waikato, 2000) Research Interests: web archiving, digitisation, optical character recognition, repositories. Bio: Gordon W. Paynter is the Digitisation Programme Manager and a Senior Application Developer at the National Library of New Zealand. He earned a PhD. in Computer Science from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, then worked for the New Zealand Digital Library Project and the University of California. He was the project manager for the New Zealand Web Harvest 2008, and currently works on digitisation and web archiving.
	Alex Potanin Job Title: Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering, Victoria University of Wellington PhD: Generic Ownership: A Practical Approach to Ownership and Confinement in OO Programming Languages (Victoria University of Wellington, 2007) Research Interests: Ownership and Immutability, OO Programming Languages, Type Systems, Software Engineering Bio: Alex is originally from Moscow, Russia with a background in Mathematics. Alex has completed his PhD in programming languages in 2006 and took up a job as a Lecturer in Software Engineering at Victoria University of Wellington. During his studies he took short breaks to work as a Visiting Researcher at Purdue University, and Software Engineer at two Wellington start-ups. While having an opportunity to go overseas both to study and to work long term, Alex stayed back in New Zealand for a variety of family reasons. Alex is happy to share his experience of the advantages (there are plenty!) and disadvantages (there are some) of staying in New Zealand both for your PhD and academic career.
	James Skene Job Title: Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland PhD: Language Support for Service-Level Agreements for Application-Service Provision (University College of London, 2007) Research Interests: James's current research interests concern the use of object-oriented modelling languages in software engineering. This interest follows from his PhD work in which he used object-oriented modelling to describe quality-of-service constraints in federated distributed systems. Bio: James Skene took a BSc in Computer Science from University College London in 2000, followed by a PhD. from the same university in 2007. During the noughties he has also worked as a programmer and consultant for a range of companies, from startups to banks. He also worked as a research fellow on a number of British and European research projects concerned with service-oriented architectures. James moved to New Zealand at the beginning of 2009, and is now working at Auckland University on a FRST fellowship.
	Jason Turuwhenua Job Title: Research Fellow, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland PhD: Applications of ray-tracing to a pseudophakic eye model (University of Waikato 2003) Research Interests: Image processing, corneal topography and generally engineering methods applied to problems in vision. Bio:Jason is a Research Fellow at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI) at the University of Auckland. He also splits his time with the Department of Optometry and Vision Science at University of Auckland, where he help teaches first year Optometrists. The ABI has an ultimate goal of a multi-scale model of the human body. Jason is involved in the eye modelling group within the institute. Jason is interested in ways in which engineering methods and computers can be applied to problems in vision. To date, he has been mainly involved in looking at methods (structured lighting) used for measuring the shape of the anterior cornea. This is the surface of interest for laser surgery. However, Jason is often interested in different things. At the moment, he is looking at whether it might be possible to render images of what a person is seeing. This may be of use in showing the debilitating affects of diseases like keratoconus (a progressive thinning of the cornea). Jason has also been working on image processing problems related to corneal nerves. Jason is of Ngati Porou, Tuhoe descent. As an under-represented demographic in his Institute, he is wondering how the Institute can interact with the under-represented communities (i.e., Maori!) in meaningful ways, whether that be in health, arts or otherwise.
	Tim Wright Job Title: Senior Business Analyst, BNZ, Wellington (also Organising Committee NZCSRSC 2001) PhD: Collaborative and Multiple Notation Programming Environments for Children (University of Canterbury, 2004) Research Interests: Changes daily. Currently Enterprise Architecture. Bio: Tim grew up on a farm in the middle of the Wairarapa hinterland. After experiencing the student lifestyle in a big city he decided to keep at it and received degrees from several different places. In 2004 he found himself lecturing Human Computer Interaction at Victoria University of Wellington. In 2005 he decided to use the skills he was teaching and entered industry. 5 years later he's recovered from the shock and can share some experiences about the differences - and the similarities - between the two. Tim now lives in suburbia and owns a chainsaw. His hobbies include bass guitar (he plays in a local band), home made curries, and fire devil sticks.