Reversing the brain drain
[ UniNews Vol. 14, No. 21
14 - 28 November 2005 ] By Paul Richiardi
How ‘the Melbourne experience’ drew five high-achieving ICT alumni back to their roots
It’s called the ‘brain drain’. Bright young Australians leave the ‘quiet’ of the antipodes for the international ‘big time’ – a wide world of opportunities in research, academia and enterprise. In the past few years, the University of Melbourne’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering has hired five Australians who did PhDs abroad, all of them Melbourne undergraduate alumni. Individual career, family and lifestyle considerations brought them home but common to all was one seminal experience...
Dr Vanessa Teague and Dr Anthony Wirth are new lecturers this year in the University of Melbourne’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). They have been friends since 1996 when they were Melbourne undergraduates and active in the Melbourne University Debating Society. Each won the Rowden White Prize as the University’s top third-year Science student – Anthony in 1998 and Vanessa in 1999.
Completing PhDs in Computer Science in the USA, at Stanford and Princeton respectively, both decided recently to return to Australia – to the University of Melbourne particularly – to begin their academic careers.
They were drawn partly by the prospect of working with internationally recognised colleagues who had once taught and supervised them, the quality of life and village campus environment at Melbourne, and the University’s large pool of excellent undergraduates.
It was also a plus that academic career paths in Australia tend to be more flexible and family-friendly than their equivalents in the USA, and that they saw promising academic and technology career opportunities in Australia.
CSSE Head Professor Rao Kotagiri welcomes the return of Dr Teague and Dr Wirth as another success for his Department in attracting top quality young career academics to the University – especially given the perceived ‘brain drain’ of young Australian scientists to the USA.
Dr Teague and Dr Wirth join three other Australian academics CSSE has hired recently from North America – Associate Professor Steven Bird, Dr Tim Baldwin, and Dr Lawrence Cavedon.
Their decisions to come back to Australia reflected individual career, family and lifestyle considerations but common to all was an attraction to return to “the Melbourne experience” they had known as undergraduates.
Professor Kotagiri says each has brought with them expertise which helps place Melbourne among the top universities in the world for language technology, machine learning and information retrieval research.
Electronic voting
Vanessa Teague’s research in cryptography, game theory and security drives a desire to contribute to the debate on electronic voting in Australia and to help improve our electoral process.
She sees potential for computing to greatly increase the transparency and reliability of elections, although “Unfortunately, their effect in the USA has been just the reverse,” she says.
Dr Teague focuses on using techniques from cryptography “to design systems of computers that work well when rational but self-interested people control the computers”.
“This includes traditional security analysis and ideas from economics. A wide range of exciting applications exists, including online auctions, allocating network resources, and electronic voting.
“When I arrived in America, I was surprised to learn that they use a rather primitive system of voting where whoever gets the most first-preference votes, wins the election. I pointed out that this system could get any idiot elected if there were several candidates on the other side, but the Americans didn’t seem to mind.
“When I returned to Australia I was equally horrified to see that one of the reasons often given for not introducing electronic voting here was that few of the available software products could handle our voting system.
“Of course, there are some good products available and some even better scientific advances have been made for improving the integrity and transparency of elections. I’m keen to ensure that the best scientific advances in this area can be used in Australia,” she says.
Computer theory
Anthony Wirth’s theoretical computer science research has included developing data clustering methods that can be used to maintain the integrity of databases and can help computers understand natural language.
He says that as a student he found insufficient opportunity to pursue theoretical computer science in Australia and is excited to use his expertise to help increase the number of research options for students here.
Dr Wirth started his PhD at Princeton in 2000 and, although he knew he intended to return to Australia, recognises that while in the USA he “picked up skills and met people I could not have back here in Melbourne”.
“Had I stayed in the USA I would still be in the thick of the theoretical computer science world and that invigorating competitive environment. But I would have denied myself ‘the Melbourne experience’,” he says.
“How many universities in the USA have both the big-city surrounds and the high quality undergraduates that Melbourne does?
“My experiences as a student here wooed me back. Many of the academic staff who encouraged me as an undergrad are now my colleagues. Compared to the USA, however, there was, and still is, little opportunity to study theoretical computer science (a field combining discrete mathematics, operations research and computer algorithms).
“My hope is that Australian students who are excited by a mathematical approach to computer science will find their curiosity satisfied at Melbourne.
“Just now we are formulating a Maths/Stats and CSSE double major program for the BSc degree and, with any luck, this is just the beginning.”
Language technology
Steven Bird returned from the USA in 2002 to take up a position with CSSE “with the specific remit to build up a research group in language technology”.
“Coming home I’ve been particularly struck by the calibre of our students. It’s a great pleasure to teach in this environment,” says Associate Professor Bird.
“I’m grateful also for the University’s research profile, which has helped our language technology research group – now 20 strong – to gain funding from the Australian Research Council, National ICT Australia (NICTA), the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and two Indigenous organisations.”
Introduced to ‘mathematical linguistics’ toward the end of his BSc (Hons) in 1985, and fascinated by algorithms (“breathtakingly clever problem-solving methods”), he decided to pursue postgraduate research in computational linguistics and language technology.
His research took him to the University of Edinburgh, a major international centre of computational linguistics, to work with one of the inventors of a promising new computational model of language called GPSG.
In 1995, having “notched up a PhD and two postdocs” he moved with his wife and two children (aged one and three) to Cameroon for two and a half years.
“Half of my time was spent on computational exploration of the phonetics and phonology of undescribed tonal languages. The other half was spent with an international mission organisation, preparing the first-ever dictionary for a language with 300,000 speakers, and helping develop 10 new writing systems to support better fluency and comprehension,” he reports.
Following a stint at the University of Pennsylvania (“the Ivy League university with the most significant language technology profile east of Stanford”), Dr Bird and his wife brought their young family home “to raise them as Australians and for them to get to know their cousins and grandparents”.
Machine translation
Tim Baldwin completed a BA/BSc at Melbourne in 1995, majoring in Linguistics and Japanese, and Computer Science respectively and developing an interest in language technology, particularly machine translation.
Looking abroad for postgraduate research opportunities he was accepted into the Masters program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech) in Japan where, with his wife, he moved, staying for six years. During that time he completed a Masters of Engineering and a PhD, both relating to Japanese-English machine translation.
“I also forged a research collaboration with the Machine Translation Research Group at one of the NTT research laboratories and balanced up my academic research at TITech through hands-on experience with the formidable NTT Japanese-English machine translation system,” says Dr Baldwin.
Offered a senior researcher position at the Centre for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University he then worked on a three-year project co-sponsored by the NTT Communication Science Laboratories and the National Science Foundation.
Now with three children – two born in Japan and one in California – Dr Baldwin looked to Australia, particularly the University of Melbourne, for a career path.
“Melbourne offered my children an ideal multilingual and multicultural environment in which to grow up, and also my wife and me the delights of the city’s cuisine, culture and general down-to-earth liveability.
“Visiting the University’s language technology group in late 2003, I realised that Steven Bird was doing a fantastic job in building up the same vibrancy and variety of language technology expertise I had enjoyed at Stanford, and that I would be able to contribute to the continued development of a world-class research group in a world-beating town.
“I started at CSSE in late 2004 and have found the research environment here all that I had hoped it would be,” he says.
Industry collaboration
Lawrence Cavedon gained his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh in 1995. He then spent four years as a lecturer in computer science at RMIT before moving with his wife Barbara (now a lecturer in the University’s Linguistics Department) to California for her to pursue her PhD.
They ended up spending more than six years in the USA, during which time he worked in Silicon Valley, “including two fun years in an R&D group for an e-commerce company”.
Dr Cavedon also worked for three years at Stanford University as a researcher, involved in building a future generation of speech-based conversational systems “able to interact more naturally with human users, understanding their intentions, personal traits, and generally being less irritating to use”.
“What I love best about Silicon Valley is the collaborative spirit you find, even in that supremely competitive hotbed. Whether it was sitting around a table with the competition working out what we could offer each other, or the way industry and academia actively worked together, it always made for a stimulating environment,” he says.
“We had always planned on moving back to Australia, but what excited me was the new NICTA initiative. The University has always had world-class research talent, but NICTA’s mandate is to reach out to industry and determine how to develop and use innovative technologies to address real needs.
“The prospect of bridging academia and industry, and potentially re-creating an aspect of what makes Silicon Valley such a uniquely wonderful and vibrant environment, really excites me,” says Dr Cavedon, now a NICTA Senior Research Fellow in CSSE.
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