Congratulations to our Jubilee Joint Fellows: Dr Dan Andrews, Dr Rhys Hawkins, Dr Iona (Jo) Ciuca , Dr Michael McCullough, and Dr Brian Parker.
The Jubilee Joint Fellowships (JJF) celebrate 50 years of computer science teaching at ANU. Each Fellowship is a unique three-year appointment, engaging in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research at the forefront of computing, while addressing major challenges in science, health and society.
During a gala event at the National Gallery of Australa, ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt AC FAA FRS said of the program:
There’s not many ideas that pop out and surprise me in the university, but this was one that I was thinking, ‘Gosh, I wish I had this idea,’ because it so embodies, I think, the possibilities.
The winners were announced by Professor Amanda Barnard AM who is the Deputy Director of the School of Computing and convenor of the JJF program.
“I think you’ll all agree there’s never been a better time to be in computing,” Barnard began before encapsulating the JJF and its mission by defining the “grand challenges” of the Information Age:
There are many grand challenges that are facing many areas of science of health, environment, and society that cannot be addressed with current advanced computing.
These problems are ‘grand challenges’ because they are too big for one discipline to solve, they are too complex for one method to address, and they are too important for us to wait.
If we want different solutions, we need to start doing things differently, and that means working in different ways and with different people.
The Jubilee Joint Fellowship Programme is more than just a fabulous way for us to celebrate 50 years of computing. It’s also a way for us to capitalise on what this is: it’s a grand opportunity. And it’s a way to bring in new expertise, new ideas, different ways of thinking, and different perspectives and experiences — and to establish enduring relationships with other parts and other disciplines across campus.
Fellows will be working across the schools of computer science, astronomy and astrophysics, earth sciences, and biological data and medical institutes on projects ranging from using genomic data to better identify patterns of pathogenic genetic variation in complex human diseases, to harnessing time-series data for almost 37 billion objects in the cosmos to discover rare, exotic objects and new phenomena.