Curriculum Vitae: Chris Johnson

Personal Details

Business Address

Department of Computer Science
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
telephone 02 6125 4509 email Chris.Johnson@anu.edu.au

Date of birth

14 December 1951

Nationality

Australian/British

Academic details

Degrees

1973

BSc (honours) Monash University Information Science 1st Class Honours

1983

PhD Australian National University Department of Computer Science, supervisor Dr R B Stanton Thesis title: "Data Structure Representation and Transformation"

Awards

1969 Victoria Senior Government Scholarship
1975 Commonwealth Postgraduate Research Award

Professional Details

Academic appointments

currently: Associate Professor (academic level D)

Dept of Computer Science, ANU

February 2008-August 2008

Acting Deputy Dean (Education) ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science

January 1998-2002, 2004-2007

Head of Department, Dept of Computer Science, ANU

January 2006 - date

Associate Professor (lecturer level D), Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University

July 1992 - December 2005

Senior Lecturer (lecturer level C), Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Australian National University

Jan 1986-June 1992

Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, ANU

May 1984-Jan 1986

Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University College, UNSW (Duntroon)

Jan 1983-May 1984

Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Monash University

Jan 1980-Dec 1982

Research Assistant/Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of York (UK)

Jan 1973-Jan 1975

Tutor in Computer Science, Department of Statistics, Faculty of Economics, ANU

Research

Research Interests

Software engineering of ubiquitous computing systems, parallel programming systems (tools, experimental implementation of parallel software systems, data management), design and implementation of high level languages.

Research projects (since 1986)

Smart Internet Technology CRC - Pelican project 2001–2004.

I was project leader in a project within the Intelligent Environments program of the CRC: the Pelican project "Defining the Context" for the development of descriptive standards, API, and software to support context-aware applications in a modern networked environment.
Partners in the CRC included 10 Australian universities, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Adacel.
 

CAP Research Program 1990–2003

The partners to the CAP Research Program were the Department of Computer Science and the Computer Sciences Laboratory at ANU, and Fujitsu Research Laboratories, Kawasaki, Japan. The broad aim of the program was to address the development of parallel computing technologies, especially those applicable to multicomputer architectures. The program was carried out on several Fujitsu AP-series multicomputers installed at ANU. The project ran from 1990 to 2003.
My work in this program was to develop methods for monitoring and debugging programs and middle-layer software running on parallel systems, object store technology for multicomputers, and persistent programming language implementation and application.
 

ACSys Cooperative Research Centre 1993–1998

The ANU, CSIRO and Sun, Fujitsu and DEC were major partners in a CRC of approx $2M per year. I was project leader in two projects that paralleled the CAP research program in the object store and persistent programming language areas, and I was program coordinator covering the area labelled "advanced server technology".
 

KRIS Project 1988–1990

This project was funded over the period Jan 1988 to Sep 1990 by an Industry Research and Development Grant (GIRD scheme) awarded by the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce. Project partners were the Department of Computer Science (with Professor R. B. Stanton, Dr B. P. Molinari and Dr. C. W. Johnson as Investigators) and Scientific Industrial Automation Pty Ltd. The aim of the project was to design and implement a programming environment for a robotics workcell. The total funding supplied under the grant was $380,000.
My responsibilities under this project involved: software systems architecture and implementation design and review; participation in the research of a task planning architecture for cooperating robots; participation in the concept proving and design of a programming environment and real-time controller for a workcell involving several cooperating robots.

Research Supervision

plus supervisory panel responsibilities for numbers of other students.

Learned societies

Member, IEEE

Member, Australian Computer Society ACS

Other professional activities and outreach

• Convenor, Women in IT Workshop, Australian National University, 8-9 July 1996.
• Treasurer, Computer Science Association (Australia/NZ) 1995-2002
• Programme Committee Member, Australian Computer Science Conference 1995-1998
• Executive Committee member, Computer Science Association (Australia/NZ) 1994- to date
• Chair, Standards Association of Australia Subcommittee IT/9/22 (Programming Languages and their Environments) 1990-1997
• Program Committee Chairman, First Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) 1986
• University of York's representative on Ada Europe Language Review Subcommittee 1981-2
• Convenor, Canberra Pascal Interest Group 1979

Extra-curricular teaching and consulting

• Constructing Software in Ada, 3 day course (run 3 times: June 1989, Dec 1989, Dec 1990) - organiser and joint lecturer
• Australian Government Department of Social Security software engineering consultant Nov 1990-May 1991
• Australian Government Department of Social Security Programming in C for Experienced Programmers - organiser and joint lecturer May 1991

Publications

Papers in Refereed Journals

• References and/or Efficiency in High-level Languages, Proc. 8th Australian Computer Conf, pp 772-788 (Aug 1978) (also published as Technical Report TR-CS-78-02 Computer Science Department Australian National University (1978))
• Semantic Errors - Diagnosis and Repair, (jointly with C Runciman), ACM SIGPLAN 82 Symposium on Compiler Construction, SIGPLAN Notices vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1982), pp 88-97
• Abstract Processes for Real Time Robot Control (jointly with B. P. Molinari, R. B. Stanton, P. Mackerras, D. Wanless, and T. E. Clark) Proceedings of 12th Australian Computer Science Conference, February 1989 (12 pages)
• Developing Robot Control Software in Modula-2, (jointly with B. P. Molinari, R. B. Stanton, P. Mackerras, D. Wanless, T. E. Clark, and J. A. Gordon) in Proceedings of 4th Australian Software Engineering Conference, May 1989 (14 pages)
• A Planner for Time-Space Co-ordination of Robots in a Structured Workspace, (jointly with R.B.Stanton, B.P.Molinari, D. Wanless and P. Mackerras): invited paper for IEEE International Workshop on Tools for AI: Architectures, Languages and Algorithms, Virginia, USA 1989
• Architecture of an Extensible Parallel Debugger (jointly with P. Mackerras) poster paper, International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 91), August 1991
• Design of a Replay Debugger for a Large Cellular Array Processor (jointly with P. Mackerras) Australian Software Engineering Conference ASWEC 91, July 1991, pp 189-201
• Towards Debugging and Analysis Tools for Kilo-Processor Computers (jointly with P. B. Thistlewaite) Fujitsu Scientific and Technical Journal, vol 29 no. 1 (Spring 1993) pp. 32-40
• Implementation and performance of the MPI Message Passing Interface on the Fujitsu AP1000 Multicomputer David Sitsky, David Walsh, Chris Johnson Australian Computer Science Communications, vol. 17 no. 1, 1995, pp 475-481.
• A Cost-based approach to performance analysis of distributed object stores S. P. Fenwick and C. W. Johnson Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian Computer Science Conference ACSC'96, Melbourne Jan 1996
• Recovery and Page Coherency for a Scalable Multicomputer Object Store Stephen M. Blackburn, Robin B. Stanton, Christopher W. Johnson, Stephan J. G. Scheuerl Proceedings of the 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-30), vol 1, pp 523-532, Jan 1997
• Location History in a Low-cost Context Awareness Environment,
  Teddy Mantoro and C.W. Johnson, in Proc Australasian Information Security Workshop and the Workshop on Wearable, Invisible, Context-Aware, Ambient, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing,
  eds. Chris Johnson, Paul Montague and Chris Steketee, ACS Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, vol 21, Adelaide, South Australia, Feb 2003, pp 153-158.
• program chair and proceedings editor, WICAPUC Workshop on Wearable, Invisible, Context-Aware, Ambient, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing,
  published as Proceedings of the Australasian Information Security Workshop and the Workshop on Wearable, Invisible, Context-Aware, Ambient, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Chris Johnson, Paul Montague and Chris Steketee,
  ACS Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, vol 21, Adelaide, South Australia, Feb 2003
• Merino: Towards an intelligent environment architecture for multi-granularity context description,
  Bob Kummerfeld, Aaron Quigley, Chris Johnson and Rene Hexel, in Workshop on User Modelling for Ubiquitous Computing, 2003.
• "Powerpoint to the people" : suiting the word to the audience,
  Rene Hexel, Chris Johnson, Judy Kay, Bob Kummerfeld and Aaron Quigley, AUIC Australasian User Interface Conference, January 2004.

Conferences and Workshops (selection)

• Porting PVM3 to the Fujitsu AP1000 Multicomputer (jointly with David Walsh and David Sitsky) presented at 1994 PVM Users' Group Meeting, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, May 19-20 1994.
• An Efficient Implementation of the MPI Message Passing Interface on the Fujitsu AP1000 (jointly with D. Sitsky and D. Walsh), poster paper, Third Parallel Computing Workshop, Fujitsu Parallel Computing Research Facilities, Kawasaki, Japan, November 1994.
• HeROD Multicomputer Object Store Implementation C. W. Johnson Proceedings of Australian-European IDEA Workshop, Coogee, NSW, Jan 1995.
• Architecture of a High-Performance Persistent Object Store C. W. Johnson, J. X. Yu and R. B. Stanton Proceedings of the Fourth International Parallel Computing Workshop, Imperial College Fujitsu Parallel Computing Research Centre, London October 1995, pp 297-306.
• Context Evidence and Location Authority: the disciplined management of sensor data into context models Chris Johnson, Carmichael, Kay, Kummerfeld, Hexel; UbiComp 2004 Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling, Reasoning and Management.

Technical reports (selection)

• The Run-Time Structure of Simula 67, Technical Report TR-CS-77-01, Computer Science Department, Australian National University (1977)
• Ada Programming Course: Lecture Notes (jointly with C H Forsyth et al.) Technical Report YCS.57(1982) Department of Computer Science, University of York (1982)
• Ada Workbench Compiler Project 1982 (jointly with J S Briggs et al.) Technical Report YCS.59(1982) Department of Computer Science, University of York (1983)
• Software Engineering Principles in the Design of a Language for Computer Aided Learning (jointly with A.J.Quaine) Technical Report TR-CS-86-07, Dept of Computer Science, ANU (1987)
• The Role of Literate Programming in Undergraduate Curricula (jointly with Terry Bossomaier), Technical Report TR-CS-94-01, Department of Computer Science, The Faculties, Australian National University (1994) (7 pages)
• HeROD flavoured Oct-Trees: Scientific Computation with a Multicomputer Object Store (Stephen Fenwick and Chris Johnson), Technical Report TR-CS-97-04, Department of Computer Science, The Faculties, Australian National University (1997) (18 pages)