Michael Wybrow, a Research Fellow of the Faculty of Information Technology, has received the 2009 Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation award for the best Computer Science PhD thesis from CORE (Computing Research and Education). CORE is an association of university departments of computer science in Australia and New Zealand. Professor Kim Marriott, Professor Peter Stuckey (Melbourne University), Dr Linda McIver, and Tim Dwyer were Michael's supervisors.
The award was presented by Professor Justin Zobel, president of CORE, on Wednesday 18 February at the Clayton School of Information Technology. Also present were Professor Sue McKemmish (Associate Dean, Research), Professor Bala Srinivasan (Head of School, Clayton), Professor Kim Marriott and various staff of the Faculty.
The award winning thesis was chosen from a high calibre field of 20 candidates. During his acceptance speech Michael said "dealing with four supervisors produced many drafts and differing points of view. This process was extremely helpful in producing the end result."
Michael commenced the Masters of Information Technology by research in 2003 at Clayton campus and upgraded to the PhD in 2004. He successfully completed his PhD in 2008, his thesis is "Using semi-automatic layout to improve the usability of diagramming software" (pdf).
"I wanted to conduct practical research that was exciting in producing something that is of benefit to the community." said Michael when asked about the tools created for drawing flowchart diagrams. The thesis covers theoretical research, including a prototype constraint-based diagram editor Dunnart, and a connector-routing library libavoid. This software has greatly increased the impact of Michael's research, for example, libavoid has been integrated into several diagramming tools. It has received interest from programmers in industry and academia, and Michael has received several offers for industry collaboration and sponsorship to encourage his work further. Further information.
Staff at the Faculty of IT extend their congratulations to Michael on his outstanding achievements and wish him all the very best for his future research work.
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| Professor Sue McKemmish. | Professor Justin Zobel congratulating Michael Wybrow. | Professor Kim Marriott, Professor Sue McKemmish, Michael Wybrow and Professor Justin Zobel. |
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| Staff from the Faculty of IT enjoying morning tea. | Michael Wybrow holding the CORE award together with Professor Bala Srinivasan and Shiranthi Ponniah. |