Waikato students win coveted PhD scholarships

27 March 2007

University of Waikato students win coveted PhD scholarships

Four University of Waikato graduate students have won coveted national top achiever doctoral scholarships in the latest funding round.

The three-year scholarships, which are aimed at the top five to ten percent of PhD candidates nationwide, provide an annual allowance of $25,000, $3000 for conference attendance and full fees.

Tertiary Education Minister Mr Michael Cullen today (27 March) announced total funding of $4.7 million over three years to 50 successful applicants.

The University of Waikato's top achiever doctoral scholars are: David Milne, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; Dave Snell and Jennifer Kinloch, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; and John Godbaz, School of Science and Engineering.

University Vice-Chancellor Professor Roy Crawford congratulated the students.

"These scholarships are keenly sought after. They acknowledge our brightest scholars and we are very proud of them," he said.

Computer science student David Milne is developing an "intuitive" search engine that "understands" people's online queries and retrieves information intelligently.

The foundation of this search engine, called Koru, is a new technique that extracts thesauri — networks of terms, topics and semantic relationships — from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and tailors these to the documents being searched.

When integrated into Koru, this creates a system that understands the concepts behind queries, improving the way they are matched to online texts and allowing related concepts to be explored interactively. In contrast, traditional search engines are blunt instruments that have no understanding of either queries or documents.

Thesauri are expensive to produce, require additional technical knowledge to use, and have limited availability. Milne's research aims to overcome these problems by automatically producing cheap effective thesauri that can be applied to the search process intuitively.

Heavy metal music fans are regularly portrayed in the media as misguided, anti-social and potentially dangerous outsiders, while psychological research has raised concerns about the possible links between the music and substance misuse and suicide. However, this traditional focus overlooks the positive aspects of listening to this form of music.

Psychology student Dave Snell's research topic, "The everyday life of Bogans: Identity and community among heavy metal fans", will explore efforts by a group of heavy metal fans to construct a sense of community that encapsulates a shared history and identity.

Another psychology student, Jennifer Kinloch, will examine the way people form associations between different stimuli which have not been associated before.

She will also develop a new method to study the processes involved in disruption or removal of those associations, which may contribute to development of rapid and effective interventions for a range of psychological problems, including anxiety disorders and phobias.

Accurate imaging is critical to process-line quality control and robotic vision in industry applications. John Godbaz will develop mathematical models (algorithms) to restore out-of-focus range images, produced by the University of Waikato Range-Imager.

The Range-Imager is a unique, high resolution, full field imager which uses a combination of modulated laser light and an image intensified digital camera to produce precise range images. However, conventional camera technology is not able to focus on objects at different ranges at the same time due to limited depth of focus.

To accurately de-blur the image, detailed knowledge on the range of objects in view of the camera is needed, information that previous de-blurring systems have lacked.

The research is expected to result in mathematical models superior to existing de-blurring methods.

ENDS

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