I am a Research Fellow in the School of ITEE (Information Technology and Electrical Engineering), working on architectures and design methodologies for reconfigurable System-on-Chip (rSoC). The group is lead by Professor Neil Bergmann, and includes myself and postgraduate students Andy Lee, Tim Lee and Peter Waldeck.
Background and Education
I completed my undergraduate studies at QUT in 1995, studying the double degree in Electronic Systems Engineering and Information Technology. The course had a heavy focus on digital signal processing (how many times must one be taught Fourier transforms and filtering theory?), and some aspects of real time systems. My final year project was an investigation and implementation of fractal image compression techniques. For a while, fractals seemed like they would be the "be-all and end-all", solving everything from image analysis and compression to stock market prediction. Fractal compression turned out to be interesting, but could not challenge wavelets for compression performance. A few people are still pushing that wagon, but it's not going anywhere in a hurry.
After graduation I moved to the UK for a year, working in a variety of jobs including gutting salmon in a processing plant in Fort William, on the west coast of the Scottish highlands. A truly awful job, and when offered a job running the IT helpdesk at Exabyte (manufacturers of tape backup systems) near Stirling, I felt no hesitation in moving back to Edinburgh. Sadly, the Exabyte Scotland plant was recently closed in a corporate restructuring move.
After returning to Brisbane at the end of 1996, I found work with Suncorp, writing insurance quoting software in Visual Basic. Tedious stuff, but well paid, and I lasted 6 months before I couldn't handle it any more.
It was around this time that I commenced a PhD back at QUT, investigating 3D computer vision. In particular I looked at the problem of registering, or aligning, multiple 3D surface views into a single, self consistent surface model. After a little over 3 1/2 years, much frustration, a few publications, and a lot of fun, I submitted my thesis on March 27, 2001. It was subsequently accepted with minor corrections, and I graduated on September 28th in that year.
For most of 2002, I worked as a postdoc in the Queensland node of the CRC for Satellite Systems, looking into reconfigurable logic and custom computing for real time satellite data processing and remote sensing applications. The idea was to develop a real time remote sensing system, which could detect and warn about unfolding or impending natural disasters. The project got as far as identifying a few event types which could feasibly be detected with onboard computing power and a modest imaging sensor, and real time implementations were developed. A general system architecture was also proposed, however that's about as far as it went before the money ran out and I was again looking for a job.
Around this time I found the position with Prof. Bergmann at UQ, and that's about where I'm up to now.
Research Interests
Over the years my interests have evolved, although through a fairly natural progression. Computer graphics and games originally interested me in computers, and by the time I wrote a 3D visualisation program using in GemBasic on an Amstrad PC at about age 15 I was pretty sure that a career in computing was for me.
During undergrad I was always most interested in image processing, developing a simple 2D computer vision and object recognition system for one project in 3rd year, as well as the afore-mentioned fractal image compression work for my final year project.
I stepped up into 3D during my PhD, and during that time formalised and cemented much of my computer vision knowledge.
The transition to reconfigurable logic and real time systems came when I moved to the CRCSS.
So, it's fair to say my research interests include, but are not limited to
- computer vision and image processing,
- reconfigurable logic and custom computing,
- embedded systems and system-on-chip,
- real time systems architectures and design, and
- complex systems
Although mostly focussed on the real time embedded stuff these days, I keep my foot in the computer vision door by co-supervising a PhD student who is following on from some of my PhD work. Maybe one day I will go full circle and return to work on real time 3D vision systems!
Publications
During my PhD I was encourage to publish early and publish often, which I did with gusto. By the end of 3 1/2 years I had around 14 refereed conference papers, and 2 refereed journal papers. You can find a partial list with electronic copies here.
Resume
Well, I'm not looking for a job at the moment, but it certainly can't hurt to put my resume out there. Here it is, in PDF format.