What's On at UWA

'Becoming an Engineer with UWA' info evening: Prospective students and their parents are invited to attend one of our info sessions to learn more about how to achieve an engineering career with UWA.

In conjunction with the UWA Business School, the UWA Careers Centre is organising an expo to promote vacation and work opportunities.

Employers attending include: EY, PwC, KPMG, Grant Thornton, Chevron, Department of Health, Shell, IBM, Communications Council, McGrath Nicol, Korda Mentha and the UWA Careers Centre.

All student welcome!

Google Tech Talk – NEXT WEEK:

What: Tech Talk - Distributed Storage & Data Processing

When: 1:00 - 2:00PM, Tues 6 August

Where: University of Western Australia, Engineering Lecture Theatre 2

Pizza provided, RSVP at link below.

The Vacation Networking Evening is a night not to miss for students looking at securing vacation work in the Oil & Gas and related industries this summer. Students from ALL Engineering disciplines (Mechanical, Chemical, Civil, Petroleum, Environmental, Electrical…) and all Commerce disciplines are urged not to miss this exclusive opportunity. Attending companies include: Wesfarmers, Chevron, BP, Shell, Schlumberger, Subsea7, Ernst & Young…and more to come! Tickets are on sale from 12-2pm in front of ECM or can be purchased online from the following link. http://www.trybooking.com/DDZK

Come and find out about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses, career options, scholarship opportunities, our valuable research, community programs and facilities.

There's also residential college tours, hands-on activities, live music, entertainment, and plenty of fun activities for the whole family as we celebrate our 100th birthday.

Configuration management and the death of system administration (we have systems to do that now) presented by Luke Williams.

Being a sysadmin is hard work. You maintain complex, changing systems using an arcane library of command-line incantations to inspect and modify elaborate configurations. Quick fixes congeal into messes of dirty undocumented hacks. Repetitive tasks are traditionally automated with scripts: sequences of commands where every line is a potential point of failure that can leave the system in an unknown state to be painstakingly resolved by hand.

Configuration management (CM) takes the mystery out of system administration. Instead of explicitly listing steps that (hopefully)result in the desired system state, a high-level description of the desired state is processed by the CM platform to determine the steps to reach it, using package adapters to reason about the current system state and generate commands to alter it.

In this talk I'll introduce Puppet, a mature configuration management platform with adapters for thousands of server applications, and Vagrant, an automatic VM provisioning tool that we can use with puppet to effortlessly spin up new environments. We'll see how a single command can rebuild an entire system, how version control makes rolling back to a previous state as simple as checking out a revision and how to use layering to avoid duplicating configuration information common to your servers.

If you'd like to follow along with your laptop, I'll be around the clubroom half an hour before the talk helping people get set up. Hope to see you there!

The Careers Centre will be promoting its services and resources in the Science Library from Monday 12th to Friday 16th August 2013.

Got a question you want answered? A Career Adviser will be available from 1.00pm-2pm, (12, 13, 15 and 16th August only) to assist with a career or employment based question you might have. Just drop in and see us.

All students welcome!

It's that time of the year again!

Head down to the tav at 7:00pm on the 21st of August for CSSC's annual Quiz Night!

Come down to the clubroom to register a table, $10 per person or $72 for a table of 8.

This year our sponsors are Good Games St James, Tactics and White Dwarf books so come down for a chance at some awesome prizes and a night of fun!

Scope: How do you creatively plan for a population of 62 million by 2100? Australia’s current major city planning frameworks only account for an extra 5.5 million people. Whether we want a ‘Big Australia’ or not, Australia’s 21st century is likely to see rapid and continual growth – if we want liveable, high performance cities and regional centres we need to think outside the box.

Speaker: Dr Julian Bolleter is an Assistant Professor at the Australian Urban Design Research Centre (AUDRC) at the University of Western Australia. His role at the AUDRC includes teaching a master’s program in urban design and conducting urban design research and design projects.

Julian and his colleague Richard Weller have recently completed a book entitled ‘Made in Australia: The Future of Australian Cities’, which scopes the urban implications of Australia’s population reaching 62.2m by 2101.

Event: This is the inaugural seminar of the Water Sensitive Cities Seminar Series for the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (Western Region), facilitating knowledge sharing amongst CRC-WSC participants and the wider community.

Following the seminar, light refreshments will be served from 5:00pm in the nearby foyer of the School of Environmental Systems Engineering. A map of the venues and parking may be found at http://goo.gl/maps/KsFBJ

For further information please contact [email protected]

We look forward to welcoming you.

'Becoming an Engineer with UWA' info evening: Prospective students and their parents are invited to attend one of our info sessions to learn more about how to achieve an engineering career with UWA. Please RSVP via http://www.ecm.uwa.edu.au/community/engineering-info-evenings

Mathematica exhibits a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art image processing and analysis functions for two and three-dimensional image composition, segmentation, feature detection, transformation, alignment, and restoration. The talk will touch several image processing application areas and demonstrate how Mathematica's fully integrated, powerful mathematical capabilities aid the rapid prototyping of image processing algorithms. We will also show how to implement dynamic and interactive interfaces for routines that require manual intervention and how to incorporate Java, C/C++, and GPU-code in the Mathematica programming language.

Dr. Markus van Almsick studied theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and biomedical image analysis at the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He has held positions at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, working on loop quantum gravity, isomer enumeration, stochastic line propagation models in image processing, and on high angular resolution diffusion imaging. For 25 years he has been a consultant to Wolfram Research Inc., contributing code to Mathematica, promoting the software with talks about scientific applications, and showing researchers how to solve their problems using Mathematica.

The School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at The University of Western Australia, with generous support from Google, is holding a CS4HS workshop in September 26-27 at UWA. The workshop is free and aimed at helping K-12 teachers (both pre- and in- service teachers) and educators learn more about using ICT through hands-on activities, presentations, sharing of innovative teaching and discussions with other educators, industry speakers, and UWA researchers. In particular, we will demonstrate how teachers can encourage learners to think and analyse a particular topic through use of ICT/CS. The workshop requires no previous programming experience.

Tristram Carfrae is responsible for the design of an impressive array of award-winning buildings and is regarded internationally as a leading designer of light weight long-span structures.

In collaborating with some of the world’s best architects, he has a reputation for challenging the established way of doing things; for exploring better solutions; and moulding both materials and people to his vision.

Tristram is behind the design of The Water Cube - Beijing’s National Aquatics Centre for the 2008 Olympics. He also boasts an impressive portfolio of other projects including: Helix Bridge, Singapore; AAMI Stadium, Melbourne; 1 Shelley Street, Sydney and Kurilpa Bridge, Brisbane.

He is named as one of Australia’s Top 100 most influential engineers and was Australian Professional Engineer of the Year in 2001.

Tristram will present stories about several projects that he has helped design over the past 30 years that illustrate how architects, engineers and, in some cases, contractors work together to produce unique designs.

Light refreshments will be served following the lecture in the foyer outside the auditorium.

RSVP by Friday, 18th October 2013.

UCC SGM for the election of a new OCM. Will be held in the Guild Council Meeting Room, on Wednesday November 6th, at 1pm. Free pizza available for those who come in during the study break to vote, back at the UCC clubroom after the SGM.

There have been many recordings of internal wave spectra in lakes.When the density profile is so that it can be approximated by a few (often two) layers of constant density there has been satisfactory agreement between the observed spectra and calculated seiche frequencies.

The situation with continuous stratification is less satisfactory.There have been several careful laboratory studies of exactly periodic standing waves in containers. Uniform stratification, constant buoyancy frequency, is the most common setup reported. There is a good picture of standing waves in a trapezoidal tank in a paper in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v388/n6642/abs/388557a0.html. (There have been many later experiments with similar pictures.)

Standing waves as above may be modelled with a stream function satisfying the one-dimensional wave equation - in space variables - equation (9.11.6) of Imberger 'Environmental Fluid Dynamics'. Boundary conditions for a closed container have the stream function constant around the boundary. The problem is mathematically not well set. Eigenspaces are infinite dimensional.

It is possible to suggest a dichotomy with two sorts of standing wave/seiche motions. On the one hand there are very smooth seiche-style oscillations as familiar with the classical solutions in rectangular boxes, semicircles, etc On the other hand there is internal wave "focusing" - with its clear evidence of the characteristic directions. See the picture in the Nature paper.

My work suggests that this dichotomy shouldn't be over-stated. Even in the nice domains with the smooth solutions there are plenty of solutions clearly showing the characteristics.The mathematics involved in this main conclusion is extremely simple.

BIO.

Grant's first degree is from UWA - in Applied Maths.Grant first met Jorg early in 1968 when Jorg was researching for his MSc at UWA,and he was tutoring, marking time before semester started in Cambridge. Grant's PhD was on "waves and free-streamline flows" at the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. After a couple of postdocs, Grant joined the staff of UWA's Maths Department in 1974, and worked there until the end of 2010. His research has involved various fluid dynamics problems,those of greatest relevance to CWR being surface water waves and internal waves.He has had a range of other interests, partly driven by who would fund his research leaves in England.

Grant has some sessional teaching in Engineering Maths at Curtin University, and some non-CWR research there. A CV and publication list is up at https://sites.google.com/site/keadyperthunis/home

Grant lives close to UWA, and has family/carer responsibilities requiring him to be able to get home more easily than is possible from Curtin. The career change from Maths to CWR is proving slower than anticipated.The work described in today's talk was motivated by a CWR concern with mixing at shorelines associated with internal wave behaviour there, and more generally that seiche frequencies are detectable in measured internal wave spectra.

It is too theoretical to be of immediately applicable, but may be of longer term relevance to scientific understanding of mixing. After getting this one submitted Grant is determined to change to computations - seiching frequencies, SWAN, etc. - concentrating on comparing theoretical results with those from computer codes.And, Grant truly loves math. software - Mathematica and Maple and Matlab -and likes helping people with these.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

****All Welcome****

The course will cover material ranging from a review of simple one-way ANOVA, to more complex designs and analyses including crossed and nested factors with fixed and random effects.The emphasis throughout will be placed on applications rather than theory. The statistical package R and R Commander will be used and some familiarity with this will be assumed.

Self-avoiding walks (SAWs) are widely studied as a problem in algebraic combinatorics by mathematicians, as a problem in algorithm design by computer scientists, as a model of phase transitions by mathematical physicists and as a model of polymers in dilute solution by chemists.

More recently biologists have used them as models of DNA folding, and to model experiments in which biological molecules are pulled from a surface. I will describe the rather short list of rigorous results, the longer list of what we "know" to be true but can't prove, and describe some numerical results that are of interest in applications. No prior knowledge is assumed.

In February, iVEC will offer the following short courses on supercomputing topics:

Introduction to iVEC: 11:00am - 12:00 Tues 4th February

Introduction to Linux: 1:00 - 2:00pm Tues 4th February

Introduction to NeCTAR Cloud Computing: 3:00 - 4:00pm Tues 4th February

Introduction to Supercomputing: 10:00am - 4pm Wed 5th February

Developing with MPI and OpenMP: 10am - 4pm Thurs 6th February

Epic to Magnus Migration: 10am - 4pm Fri 7th February

Further details of the courses are available at http://ivec.org/services/training

Courses are delivered in a face to face classroom style. Attendees are encouraged to bring and work on their own laptops. Staff from the Supercomputing Team will be facilitating so you can meet and chat with them.

Courses are free of charge and open to all, however places are limited. Light refreshments and lunch will be provided on each day. Any queries, please contact Dr Valerie Maxville – [email protected]. Please complete the form to register for this training. Note that places are limited. If you are needing additional training before the end of the year, please contact Valerie to organise a small group session.

New to the club this year? Want to meet some of the other new people, some older people, and do some computer stuff? At 5pm this Friday, all Freshers and new members should come on up to the loft (just above the clubroom; see your fresher guide) to break the ice on your UCC experience. There'll be a few short presentations and introductions on how to make the most of all the services the club supplies, including a basic introduction to Linux. As an added incentive, all first time members get FREE pizza!

UCC's AGM, for the election of express purpose of electing the eight new committee members for 2014: president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, three ordinary commmittee members (OCMs), and one fresher representative (fresher rep).

Send all nominations and agenda items to [email protected]. The current agenda can be found at http://wiki.ucc.asn.au/AGM2014Agenda.

If you don't know where the Council Meeting Room is, join the group leaving the clubroom just before 1pm, on Tuesday, 11th of March.

Hope to see lots of people there!