School of Engineering and Computer Science

The sixteenth Electronics New Zealand Conference (ENZCon 2009) was recently held at the University of Otago. The papers presented broadly covered the areas of electronics, signal and image processing, RF-design, FPGA processing and antennas.

Victoria University's Faculty of Engineering students made an impact, with Carl Benton winning the best presentation prize for his joint paper on: The Comparison of Analogue and Digital One-Cycle Control Feedback Methods around the Output Stage in a Digital Audio Power Amplifier (C.D. Benton, D.A. Carnegie and P. Gaynor). Ben Drayton (Victoria University Honours students starting a PhD next year) was awarded the best novice presenter prize for:  Life Sign Detection on a Disposable Robotic Platform as Part of a Three-Tier System for Urban Search and Rescue Operations (B.M.M. Drayton, and D.A. Carnegie).

Professor Dale Carnegie said, “overall the conference was a good opportunity for staff and students in this field to share technological research that could future benefit New Zealand’s economy. The Conference highlighted the depth and quality of the research coming out of the Faculty of Engineering at Victoria University”.

Victoria University will offer a Master of Engineering next year, beginning in February.

The programme will enable students to undertake a research project in electronics, computer systems networking, software engineering or a combination of these. It will cater for students with an appropriate Honours degree. John Hine, Head of Victoria's School of Engineering and Computer Science and Faculty of Engineering, said that the Master's was a great option for new researchers.

“The Engineering programme at Victoria is unique in that it integrates electronics and software development.“

Victoria has the leading software engineering group in the country and a superb programme in mechatronics; essentially working with robots. We've got the largest fleet of mobile robots in New Zealand.

“Our researchers are also part of the international Honeynet project and are doing fascinating things to improve Internet security. “

The Master's is an opportunity to study a particular topic in greater depth. It will be of interest to both engineering and science graduates as well as students from related areas like industrial design.

“Companies involved in research and development could also work with students from the School on collaborative Master's projects.”

Potential Master's students should visit the Engineering website to find a supervisor they may wish to do research with: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/engineering For more information please view the Postgraduate prospectus page http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Main/ProspectivePostgraduates, or contact Professor John Hine (Dean, Faculty of Engineering) John.Hine@ecs.vuw.ac.nz.

On the 4th September Massey and Victoria engineering and computer science students came together in the annual IEEE New Zealand Central Section (http://ewh.ieee.org/r10/nzc/) postgraduate presentation event, held at Victoria University in the Old Government Buildings. Fifteen students presented to an audience of their peers, staff from Massey and Victoria and members from the IEEE and IET. The presentations were of an excellent standard covering a range from electronics, communication systems and networking to Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering and it showed many synergies exist between the Massey and Victoria research groups.

It was difficult to pick the winners, but after an agonising discussion the overall winner was Harry Jones (Victoria) who talked about his honours project in channel sounding with software defined radio. In second place Ayesha Hakim (Massey) presented on a reliable hybrid technique for human face detection. As runners-up Adrian Jongenelen (Victoria) talked about compact real-time range imaging systems and Keith Cassell (Victoria) told us about clustering techniques to improve the maintainability of object oriented classes.

Many thanks to all who took part and we look forward to next years event!