I am a PhD student supervised by David Hawking and Ramesh Sankaranarayana at the Department of Computer Science at ANU. I'm currently researching Adversarial Information Retrieval in the web. Basically I'm interested in looking at ways of preventing people from unfairly altering search engine ranking.
In addition to information retrieval, I'm also interested in recommender systems, effective software design, and computer and information security.
If you're interested in participating in our experiments, you can join our mailing list to be kept up to date with upcoming user experiments and other research.
Alternatively, you can contact me at tim.jones@anu.edu.au.
At the DCS/CSL morning tea a month or so ago, I mentioned the idea of running a "tools afternoon", in order to expose some of the hidden and distributed knowledge we have in the department(s) about tools and programming techniques we use in the course of research.
The basic idea is to have a bunch of 10-20 minute show-and-tell sessions about a favorite tool or programming technique. If, for example, you use a particular version control system, or IDE, or programming language, or whatever, and you think that others might benefit from hearing about it, then this is for you. If you're simply interested in hearing about tools and techniques you don't know about, then this is for you too.
If you're interested in presenting, you don't need to be an expert in a particular tool, nor does your talk need to be very polished - the idea is to provide a simple introduction as a stepping stone for someone who doesn't know anything about whatever tool/technique you're presenting.
As an example, I use the refactoring tools in Eclipse quite a bit when doing Java development, so I'd be quite happy to talk about that. I could also talk about easy ways to use Eclipse to do test driven development (which is awesome, as then you end up with tested code, which can sometimes lead to correct programs). I also quite like darcs for version control, so I'd be happy to talk about why that is. As something I'd like to hear about, I'd be interested in hearing about things for munging data on the command line (such as sed and awk), or really anything else I don't know much about.
There was quite a positive response to this idea at the morning tea, so I'd like to get some discussion going about the kinds of things people would like to hear about, and the kinds of things that people might be interested in presenting. Feel free to email me lists of things you'd like to hear about, or things you can talk about. I'll make a list of requests and possible talks, and send it back out.
I'm not sure when the best time to run this would be. I'd quite like to do it in the second half of July, as I am about to go away until then. However, if people really wanted it sooner, it could always run without me :)
The Google chart API is pretty cool. It provides custom charts constructed from parameters passed in the URL. I might use it to make some neat graphs later, but without needing to make any neat graphs at the moment, I have instead made a funk-o-meter to describe how funky I am feeling. You can see mine on the left, and I encourage you to make your own. The URL for this one is:
The bits you want to change are the t:40 (0 to 100 are the possible values, and change the arrow) and the label for the text (just after the chl= bit). If, for example, you are feeling Dangerously Funky, use:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=330x140&chd=t:90&cht=gom&chl=Dangerously%20Funky&chco=00ff00,ffff00,ff0000
Kind of like twitter, but for expressing only how funky you are :)
I have been enrolled in the PhD program at ANU since February 2007. Here are my publications so far:
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A Framework for Measuring the Impact of Web Spam
T. Jones, D. Hawking, R. Sankaranarayana (2007)
Proceedings of the 12th Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS 2007)
Short paper; poster
I also completed a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science at Otago University in 2005. Here are my publications while at Otago:
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Both Sides of the Digital Battle for a High Rank from a Search Engine
T. Jones (2005)
Association for Computing Machinery New Zealand Bulletin, 1(2)
Full paper - Recommending Geocaches
A. Trotman, T. Jones, C. Handley (2005)
Proceedings of the 10th Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS 2005) pp. 76-83M
Full paper