barns.blog

Greetings from a sunny, but slightly chilly Wilderness. So far a lot has come out of this conference that I thought I would report on. In an egotistical manner, the best is still to come!

Firstly, we drove down on Sunday and had a wonderful relaxed drive. We stopped for lunch at Storms River and then visited the Tsitsikamma Big Tree. We have enjoyed a good social atmosphere with a large group of people from both the CS and IS departments and it has been enjoyable interacting with them all on a social level. As Kevin observed last night: Three generations of Computing Sciences at one table.

The Masters and Doctoral Symposium yesterday was rather rewarding even for those of us who were not participating in it. I took a few things away from it which could be tackled in the Department or actually at Rhodes in general. The following general comments were made:

• Students frequently don’t structure their research objectives (research question) properly.
• Some of the work being conducted was not research in the sense that students are not illustrating what their work is achieving. In particular, a software project is not a research goal.
• Students need to be more articulate about what is their research and what was others research. Here they also need to sell the research.
• Also, it is important in the research to answer the questions WHAT, WHY, HOW and most importantly, the SO WHAT.

My presentation will be rather different as I was not contributing in the M&D, but rather to SAICSIT itself. This means that I am unlikely to get as much feedback from the audience, but also less criticism.

The presentations today were of mixed value to me, but the most interesting was a discussion of high performance scientific computing using the Amazon EC2. It left me with a few ideas.

The conference hotel is reasonable, but not outstanding. Last nights cruise from Knysna to the Featherbed Nature Reserve and supper in the trees was absolutely superb and will be one of the highlights of the conference.