Dr Nick Falkner

Biography/ Background

• Associate Dean (IT), Faculty of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences
• Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide
• 2003-2006: Network engineer
• 2000-2004: Winemaker
• 1996-2000: Senior Systems Administrator, School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide 

Awards & Achievements

I have been awarded an Australian Council of Deans of ICT Learning and Teaching Academy (ALTA) Fellowship for the next two years.

The Puzzle-Based Learning Course (COMP SCI 1010 and the associated Introduction to Engineering Courses) has been recognised by the US-based Decision Sciences Institute with an Honorable (sic) Mention for their Instructional Innovation Awards. I'm proud to share this with Professor Zbigniew Michaelwicz (also of the school of Computer Science) and Professor Raja Sooriamurthi (Carnegie Mellon University, USA). We were in the top 3 of all the considered candidates and a definite crowd favourite. 

Teaching Interests

I teach across all of the undergraduate years and have implemented new assessment strategies to try and engage and motivate students to learn. I am a strong proponent of the Puzzle-Based Learning course and was the course co-ordinator in 2010.

In 2013 I will be teaching the first course in our new degree program, the Bachelor of Computer Science (Advanced). This new program allows you to take additional courses with a focus on extension and project development and has entry criteria based on your ATAR or GPA scores. Students in the BCSA will undertake our standard courses with other students but will have a special opprtunity to develop their skills in the company of students at a similar level.

I am particularly interested in innovative assessment mechanisms that encourage personal development, rather than rote-learning. I try to make extensive use of new and innovative technologies, once I have established that they are actually of benefit to all concerned!

In the first half of 2013 at North Terrace Campus I will be teaching:

• First Year: COMP SCI 1103/1203 Algorithm Design and Data Structures

Research Interests

Research Supervision

As a supervisor, I expect you to be an active participant within the school's research community and also the Faculty and University community. That means attending seminars, reading lots of paper, thinking and discussing your ideas with me, other supervisors, and other academics, as needed. I'll help you with your project planning and initial methodology but I expect you to work with me and, as you progress, take more and more responsibility for your own project and research direction. (I will always be there to help you if you get stuck!)

I expect to meet with most of my students at least once a week and we find that the best results tend to come when students come in and work, at Uni, over a roughly 9-5 work day, 5 days a week. For part-time students, or students with pre-existing commitments, we are flexible and you should always discuss things with me first so that I can help you, or let you know where to go to get help.

Working with me, you will read a lot and you will write a lot. I turn drafts around quickly, but often with a lot of red pen showing where improvements can be made. This is 'friendly' red pen because I'm trying to help you make your work better. Your final thesis is a statement to the world of what you have done and what you have discovered - I want to help you make it the best document you can, but you will be the one doing the writing.

Finally, I will try to pass on to you my excitement about research in this growing and interesting field, as well as the importance of scientific rigour, accuracy and producing work that is both interesting and useful.

Applying for a Supervisor

If you wish to ask me to be your supervisor, I expect you to provide a brief covering e-mail, your current CV, an academic transcript for all of your qualifications and a 5 page research proposal, outlining which of my research areas you are thinking about. Please do not submit a research proposal that is composed of text that you have copied from the Internet and then mildly edited to make it read sensibly. I want to read your own words so that I can form an idea as to how and if we could work together.

I am always happy to consider a candidate but I regularly tell potential students that I can't supervise them because they have obviously not checked my areas of research or they send me proposals that are obviously cut-and-pasted from Internet sources. I require a very high standard of integrity in research and scholarship, as does the University. Please, send me your own ideas in your own words. (All documents greatly preferred as PDFs, no smaller than 10 point Times New Roman, single spaced!)

Areas of Research

Network As Formal Objects Group

My primary area of research is an applied form of knowledge representation, focussed on the field of Computer Networks. I am working with Associate Professor Matthew Roughan, Applied Mathematics, and some of his students to develop a configuration generation framework that can take policy statements, network archetypes and configuration fragments to generate the complete configuration instructions for large networks, from switch to high-level router.

We are investigating the classification of networks as part of our project to produce a topology zoo, in the Linnaen sense of classification. We hope to capture enough species over time to form a robust taxonomy for networks. Our topology zoo work may be found here.

 Our early work in this field was discussed at a workshop help at the start of 2010. The workshop webpage may be found here.

We are also working towards optimal resource allocation in computer networks, derived from human policy statements. This area includes multi-objective optimisation, as well as large amount of routing and general network theory. We have had recent success with two papers accepted, to an A journal and an A conference, with other papers in preparation for submission to leading publication venues in our area.

Wine 2030 Grant

I received a Wine 2030 grant to study fermentation behaviour in actively fermenting wine in order to develop reliable temperature models. The project involves building and deploying large temperature probes to inform, validate and develop a logical temperature model to give reliable estimates of what is actually happening in the must. As a professionally qualified winemaker, although no longer practising, I have a great deal of interest and knowledge in this area. I am always looking for good students to help out on projects such as this and this project is due to be advertised as a fourth year engineering project shortly.

Data Representation

My PhD thesis was on the  discovery and classification of information in large systems, with a focus on accumulating sufficient context for information to use it as knowledge.

I presented an invited talk at the 9th International Workshop on Web Semantics, Bilbao, Spain, 2010, entitled "Philosophy Goes Information Technology - A Critical Reflection on Ontologies", which discussed the overuse of the use of the word 'ontology', often used to describe taxonomies or structures that cannot be used for ontological reasoning. This was part of an ongoing collaboration with the Institut Für Anwendungsorientierte Wissensverarbeitung (FAW), Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. A.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfram Wöß and Dipl.-Ing. Christina Feilmayr were co-authors for the invited talk and we are continuing our collaboration on my sabbatical trip in early 2011 to Austria. Bis bald, Linz!

Education Research

My education research interest include improving student engagement and retention, with an additional goal of developing professional skills, including problem solving abilities and the importance of a consistent ethical framework. I have also started publishing within the new and exciting area of Puzzle-Based Learning, including a number of workshops presented both in Australia and overseas.

I am currently looking for a good PhD student candidate for an exciting project involving student time management, social currency and a detailed analysis of over 5 years of accumulated data on student hand-in behaviours. I welcome applicants with a social science background, who have some familiarity with computer science education and a reasonable grasp of statistics. (Any floating cognitive neuroscientists, or related psychologists, please consider applying!)

Current Students

• Simon Knight (PhD) with Matthew Roughan, Hung Nguyen and Matthew Sorrell
• Thushari Atapattu (PhD) with Katrina Falkner
• Yongrui Qin (PhD) with Michael Sheng)
• Thomas Haig (PhD, Starting in April, 2012)

Previous Students

Publications

Some of my publications in the last 5 years: 

K. Falkner, N. Falkner "Integrating Communication Skills into the Computer Science Curriculum", SIGCSE 2012, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2012.

S. Knight, H. Nguyen, N. Falkner, R. Bowden, M. Roughan, "The Internet Topology Zoo", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, special issue on Measurement of Internet Topologies, 2011.

R. Bowden, H. Nguyen, N. Falkner, S. Knight, M. Roughan, "Planarity of Data Networks", International Telecommunications Conference, September, 2011, San Francisco.

N. J. G. Falkner, “Security technologies and policies in organisations.” in ICT Ethics and Security in the 21st Century: New Developments and Applications, Chapter 10, M. Quigley (ed.), IGI Global, 2011.

H. Nguyen, M. Roughan, S. Knight, N. Falkner, R. Bush, and O. Maennel, “How to build complex, large-scale emulated networks,” Proceedings of TridentCOM 2010, LNCIST, Springer, Berlin, 2010. 

N. J. G. Falkner, R. Sooriamurthi and Z. Michalewicz, “Puzzle-Based Learning for Engineering and Computer Science”, 43, 4, IEEE Computer, IEEE Computer Society, April, 2010. 

N. Falkner, R. Sooriamurthi and Z. Michalewicz, Puzzle-Based Learning: The first experiences, to appear in the Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference, Adelaide, December, 2009.

N. J. G. Falkner and Q. Z. Sheng, Significance-Based Failure and Interference Detection in Data Streams, 20th International Conference on Database And Expert System Applications, LNCS 5690, Linz, Austria, 2009.

N. J. G. Falkner, Is Comprehension or Application the More Important Skill for First-Year Computer Science Students, ERGO, the Journal of the Educational Research Group of Adelaide, volume 1, number 2, University of Adelaide, 2009.

N. J. G. Falkner, Ontologically-based Context Checking in Arbitrary Programming Languages, Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Web Semantics, Turin, Italy, IEEE Computer Society, 2008. 

N. J. G. Falkner, Using Ontologies to Support Customisation and Maintain Interoperability in Distributed Information Systems with Application to the Domain Name System, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge and the Grid, Gui Lin, China, IEEE Computer Society, 2006.

Community Engagement

I presented a National Science Week talk entitled "Puzzle? Think... Solve" with Professor Zbigniew Michalewicz, as part of South Australian State Government funded National Science Week activities. This was a three-hour presentation aimed at students and parents of students, but attracted a great deal of general interest.

Expertise for Media Contact

Categories	Education, Information technology
Expertise	teaching technology; computer networking; higher education; teaching; teaching approaches; computer security; information management; data science; data scientist; distributed computing; advanced teaching; student engagement; winemaking
Notes	Fellow of the Australian Council of Deans of ICT's Learning and Teaching Academy

Entry last updated: Monday, 4 Feb 2013