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ReseaRch & InnovatIon

Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences

Research Case Study Research Case Study

Introducing Our Research


1Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences

ReseaRch case studIes 10

WeKa takes off 10

Libraries go digital with Greenstone 11

FLaX weaves a knowledge basket for language learners 12

smarter searching with Wikipedia 13

te Reo boosted by computer-aided translation 14

cyber security software a global winner 15

network measurement goes global 16

Keeping the internet running smoothly 17

engineers turn to formal methods to model complex systems 18

Making software reliability a reality 19

does colour influence digital readability? 20

unlocking the secrets of the sun’s energy 21

Key to puzzle poses mathematical conundrum 22

statistics proves secret weapon in fight against invasive species 23

Want to KnoW MoRe? 24

FRoM the dean 2

IntRoducInG ouR ReseaRch 4

digital libraries 5

Machine learning 6

network performance and dynamics 6

Formal methods 7

human-computer interaction 7

Information systems and databases 8

computer graphic design 8

Mathematics 9

statistics 9

Contents


2 University of Waikato | research capabil ities

From The Dean

Recognised nationally and

internationally for our expertise, the

Faculty of Computing & Mathematical

Sciences conducts leading research

in several branches of computer

science, mathematics and statistics.

We have developed a strong track record and reputation

for our innovative research both in New Zealand and

internationally, attracting research funding worth around

$23 million over the last ten years.

Among the outputs of this research has been international

award-winning digital library and data mining software, and

network monitoring hardware that’s helped put New Zealand

on the map in the international cyber security industry.

Our research expertise also covers areas such as human-

computer interaction, and mathematical modelling for better

software testing, increasing data storage and monitoring

solar activity. The Faculty also has a thriving research

student programme.

We currently work with a wide range of industry, business

and government organisations, and we welcome enquiries

from other potential partners and from prospective research

students. This booklet will give you more information about

what we do, and what we can do for you.

Professor Geoff Holmes

Dean

Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences






The Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences has

six research groups in computer science, and also

supports active research in computer graphic design,

mathematics and statistics.

It is home to the Centre for Open Software Innovation (COSI),

the University’s flagship research centre for computer science

theory and practice. Established in 2009, COSI draws together

a range of research groups within the Faculty with the aim

of inspiring and extending open development practice in

computer science.

The Faculty’s researchers collaborate with leading-edge

organisations across the world, including Google, NASA and

UNESCO, and their research is behind some of New Zealand’s

biggest high-tech success stories.

The cyber security hardware sold worldwide by New Zealand

multi-million dollar company Endace was originally developed

at Waikato, while the Greenstone open source digital library

system has won international awards and is used in more

than 60 countries around the world. Another global success is

our WEKA data mining software, which now has more than a

million and a half users worldwide.

Other research teams are focussing on developing theories to

underpin the creation of a future generation of tools like these.

The Faculty has gained international recognition for work in the

field of sun spot activity (which can affect electrical systems

on Earth), combinatorial designs which will allow better data

storage and encryption, and complex mathematical models

that can be formally proven in order to test software even

before it has been written.

The Faculty’s research is also contributing in the social, cultural

and educational spheres. Greenstone researchers are exploring

ways to harness the power of digital libraries to help language

learners and open up access to valuable archive material. Other

groups are working on better human-computer interaction for

a variety of users, ranging from tourists to children learning to

read, while yet others are using statistical analysis of population

genetics to map migration patterns.

The Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences

has an impressive track record in research ranging

from digital libraries to sun spot activity.



The Digital Libraries Group develops software systems that

automatically impose structure on information, no matter

how anarchic or distributed its storage, and give information

consumers effective tools to find text, images and sounds. Its

flagship creation is Greenstone (www.greenstone.org), an

open source digital library system with users ranging from the

United Nations to the BBC. The group is also building digital

infrastructures to exploit huge informal knowledge structures

(such as Wikipedia), and vast lexical databases that reflect how

language is used in practice.

Current researCh:

» Techniques for creating, managing and maintaining

collections; processing multimedia content, and extracting

metadata from legacy documents.

» FLAX allows language teachers to provide students with

a structured exposure to language based on material they

collect and databases of phrases culled from the web.

» Wikipedia Miner automatically enhances ordinary

documents with explanatory links to Wikipedia articles.

» Novel display mechanisms that emulate real books,

augmented by automatic search and browse facilities

(this document is available in virtual book format at

www.scms.waikato.ac.nz).

Digital libraries http://cosi.cms.waikato.ac.nz/projects

“As a geographically isolated but technologically advanced nation, New Zealand stands to gain markedly from effective deployment of information resources that are freely available on international computer networks.”

Professor Ian WItten




The WAND group is the University’s Computer Networks

research group. The group has a protocols and measurement

focus and is widely known for its public internet data sets

and measurement tools. Areas of interest include discovery

of the internet’s macroscopic topology, event detection,

fine grained and internet scale simulation, operating systems

for wireless sensor networks, cyber security and network

traffic visualisation.

Current researCh:

» Autonomous (self managing) networks including machine learning and statistically based performance and intrusion anomaly detection systems.

» Architectures for massive scale internet measurement (up to 100,000 measurement devices).

» Distributed operating systems for very small wireless devices.

network performance and dynamics www.wand.net.nz

“In researching the Internet’s behaviour and

performance, WAND has shown YouTube

how to deliver content faster and with less

impact on other users. We gave millions of

users a few seconds each and that adds up to

whole lifetimes saved.”

Professor tony McGreGor

The Machine Learning Group develops programs to

automatically extract useful information from data. The aim

is to identify patterns that can be used to automatically make

future predictions or to help people make decisions faster

and more accurately. The group has developed the WEKA

software ‘workbench’ which uses machine learning to derive

useful knowledge from databases that are too large to be

analysed by hand. WEKA has been used to analyse genetic data,

supermarket transactions, soil samples and natural language.

Current researCh:

» MOA (Massive Online Analysis), a software tool which

enables users to analyse large, continuous data sources.

» Developing new machine learning algorithms in WEKA.

» Developing tools for generating and documenting

applications involving machine learning.

Machine learning www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml

“Every two days we create as much data

as we did from the dawn of civilization up

until 2003. It is our aim to develop software

that can turn this quantity of data into

useful information.”

Professor Geoff HolMes


7Faculty of Computing & Mathematics Sciences

The HCI Group is researching how computing technology can

better fit user needs, and provides theories and tools to assist

developers to make useful and usable systems which offer

intuitive, appealing and appropriate interaction.

Current researCh:

» Interaction techniques and technologies for small

screen devices, including information retrieval, navigation

and entertainment.

» Information visualisation, interaction techniques and

technology for better managing energy use in the home.

human-computer interaction www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/hci

Just as other engineering disciplines use mathematical models

to test and improve their designs, so the Formal Methods Group

uses the machinery of mathematics to design software that is

reliable, to specification, ‘right first time’ and usable. The group

is developing languages and tools for modelling systems and

transforming them into dependable code. This is of particular

interest in critical applications such as aerospace and transport,

or where there are very large costs associated with mistakes

and delays, such as in bespoke industrial-scale applications.

Current researCh:

» Tools to support precise modelling of critical systems.

» Further development of languages and theory underlying

software development for critical systems.

Formal methods www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/Research/fm

“Software development should be as

high-quality and dependable as all other

engineering disciplines – currently it isn’t,

but we aim to make it so.”

Professor steve reeves

“As computer-based technology becomes

more and more pervasive in our everyday

activities, we need to maximise its

usefulness, minimise its intrusion, and ensure

that it enhances rather than overwhelms

our lives. Our research in human-computer

interaction is aimed at these goals.”

Professor Mark aPPerley




Researchers are involved in a diverse range of projects relating

to visual communication and interactivity. Applications include

typography for children’s on-screen reading, user interfaces for

large information stores, image selection in a design context,

pattern making and typography.

Computer graphic design www.cgd.waikato.ac.nz

“Visual Communication Design is purposeful

creativity that touches everything in our

visual world. Computer Graphic Design

research extends and exploits technology

in order to enhance accessibility and

effectively communicate messages that may

inform, persuade, enlighten and entertain.”

Ms Polly cantlon

The Information Systems and Databases Group specialises in

software infrastructure that enables the interaction of services

and applications to deliver personalised information specific

to locations and events. Context aware software services can

enhance user experiences of ‘real world’ offerings through

‘virtual’ augmented services.

Current researCh:

» A mobile tourist information system that provides

travellers with up-to-date information and

recommendations about what to do and where to go,

» An electronic parrot – a personalised extension of your

memory that will make it easier to remember people,

events, and data.

Information systems and databases http://isdb.cs.waikato.ac.nz/

“We aim to design effective mobile systems

that empower human users anytime,

anywhere – from natural disaster warning and

mobile health care support, to smart travel

navigation and augmented human memory.”

Dr annIka HInze



Mathematics www.math.waikato.ac.nz

Researchers in the Department of Mathematics have expertise

in number theory, general combinatorics, group theory, lattice

rules, astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics, general relativity,

quantum mechanics and algebraic systems. Applications

include predicting solar activity, optimal stock market portfolio

selection, cryptographic systems and data storage.

statistics www.stats.waikato.ac.nz

The Department of Statistics offers expertise in Bayesian

statistics, mixture models, biometrics, robust statistics,

industrial statistics, statistical modelling, statistical ecology

and population genetics. Applications include the development

of new statistical tools to analyse large data sets, data sets

with missing values, multivariate data sets, and other complex

data sets and processes. The Department is also home to the

Waikato Centre for Applied Statistics, which offers research and

consultancy services.

“Apart from providing an endless source

of fascinating ideas and problems,

mathematics is an enabling science

having applications in industry, weather

forecasting, financial modelling,

cryptography, astrophysics and many

other areas. Both theoretical and applied

aspects of mathematics are investigated by

researchers at Waikato.”

Dr Ian HaWtHorn

“Statistics has many valuable applications.

I work with medical researchers to find

ways to predict whether a patient’s Type 2

diabetes will resolve following stomach

stapling. We use statistical techniques

to identify the attributes that are the

important predictors of success.”

Dr lyn Hunt

Research Case Study


It may be named after a flightless bird native to New Zealand,

but the WEKA data mining software workbench created

at the Centre for Open Software Innovation (COSI) has

certainly taken off.

Developed by the Machine Learning Group in the mid-1990s,

the award-winning open-source software has been downloaded

by more than one and a half million users worldwide.

“It’s been hugely influential,” says Professor Geoff Holmes.

“It’s been used in novel applications in areas including signal

processing, computer games, graphics, human computer

interaction and computer networks.”

WEKA was developed to analyse large datasets, and commercial

spin-offs from the project have been used to analyse soil

samples and gas chromatography. One key commercial user is

Netherlands-based agriculture and horticulture laboratory BLGG

Agroxpertus, which has processed more than one million soil

and plant samples using specially-adapted software.

Professor Holmes, Associate Professor Bernhard Pfahringer

and post-doctoral fellow Dr Albert Bifet are now working on

software that will allow incremental learning.

“Incremental learning allows users to model data streams,

rather than data sets,” says Professor Holmes. “This gets round

the problem of storing very large amounts of data in memory,

and also allows real time monitoring for detecting and adapting

to changes in the data.”

The project is known as MOA (Massive Online Analysis) and

possible applications include sentiment analysis by monitoring,

for example, Twitter streams for customer feedback on

products. It could also be used to detect outbreaks of crop

diseases. “For example, you could have cameras in a kiwifruit

orchard and monitor the leaves for signs of the vine-killing

bacteria PSA.”

Supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Royal

Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund.

www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka

WEKA was developed to analyse

large datasets, and commercial

spin-offs from the project have

been used to analyse soil samples

and gas chromatography.

WEKA takes off


Research Case Study

Created at the University of Waikato, Greenstone Digital Library

software is used by organisations in more than 60 countries

and available to speakers of 35 languages.

Greenstone Digital Library software created at the University

of Waikato has achieved truly global reach. The international

award-winning tool for creating and distributing digital

library collections is used in more than 60 countries and

available to speakers of 35 languages.

Developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO for

humanitarian purposes, this open-source software allows users

of different computer operating systems to create their own

libraries in electronic format for web publication or distribution

on CD or DVD.

Greenstone software has been used to collate information

for disaster relief operations in Latin America, for combating

AIDS in Africa, and for development project work in French

sub-Saharan Africa.

Organisations wanting to collate and preserve libraries of

social, cultural and historical significance are also turning

to Greenstone, such as Kabul University’s Greenstone-based

library of 37,000 documents preserving Afghani literature,

music and cultural heritage, and Chicago University Library’s

significant collection of early edition works by Chopin.

Hamilton-based spin-off company DL Consulting has

customised Greenstone to create Papers Past at the National

Library of New Zealand, a flagship collection of more than

one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and

periodicals covering the period 1839-1945. The commercially-

licensed system, called Veridian, is also being used in Singapore

and the United States.

The Digital Library project team is led by Professor Ian Witten

and Associate Professor David Bainbridge at the Centre for

Open Software Innovation (COSI).

Supported by the NZ Lotteries Board,the Ministry of Science and

Innovation, the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund, the Ministry

of Education, UNESCO, Google Inc and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

www.greenstone.org

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast

www.dlconsulting.com

Libraries go digital with Greenstone


Research Case Study

The internet offers a virtually unlimited source of teaching

and learning resources, but harnessing those resources can be

daunting. An innovative education tool developed by the Digital

Libraries group at the University of Waikato allows language

teachers to create a variety of practice exercises from ‘real’

language texts and multimedia available through digital libraries.

Flexible Language Acquisition – or FLAX – is an easy-to-use

open-source software tool for language teachers and students.

Teachers design structured exercises for individual or group

work to match the students’ learning goals. Existing digital

library collections can be used as the source of language

material, or teachers can easily build their own.

FLAX is supported by the University’s Greenstone Digital Library

Software, an award-winning digital library system used across

the world. It has been developed in conjunction with University

of Waikato language teaching experts and extensively trialled

in New Zealand, Japan and Timor Leste.

Project leader Professor Ian Witten says FLAX has been

designed to work on Linux, Windows and Mac. “Wherever you

are in the world, whatever kind of computer you use, as long

as you have access to a web browser you can install FLAX

and use it locally – even if you’re not on the internet.”

The research team is currently working on ways to extract

phrases and collocations from a corpus supplied by Google

with the aim of helping students improve vocabulary

acquisition and writing skills.

Supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund

and the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

http://flax.nzdl.org

www.greenstone.org

The internet offers a virtually unlimited

source of teaching and learning resources.

FLAX helps teachers to harness those resources.

FLAX weaves a knowledge basket for language learners


Research Case Study

Looking for information on the web can be like looking for a

needle in a haystack – particularly if you don’t know exactly

what you are looking for. That might be a hotel in a city

you don’t know, or a potential overseas distributor for your

products. Now imagine being able to funnel the resources

of the open encyclopedia Wikipedia into the search for the

information you need.

Wikipedia Miner does just that. The software tool, developed

by PhD student David Milne and Professor Ian Witten of the

University of Waikato’s Digital Libraries Group at the Centre

for Open Software Innovation (COSI), allows users to use

Wikipedia as a gigantic thesaurus, and also to compare terms

and concepts to measure how strongly they are related

to each other.

Wikipedia Miner can even ‘wikify’ text by automatically

detecting topics in the document and creating links to the

appropriate Wikipedia articles. The researchers have been

using existing Wikipedia articles to ‘train’ the program to

make the same decisions as humans regarding what’s

important in any document.

“Wikipedia is the largest and most visited encyclopaedia

in existence,” says Milne, “and it’s also densely structured.

There are literally hundreds of millions of links which allow

you to encounter information you might never have thought

of searching for. What we’re trying to do is bring the same

explanatory links to all documents on the web.”

The software is still at the prototype stage and is being trialled

in the University of Waikato Faculty of Education’s Science

Learning Hub website.

Supported by a Tertiary Education Commission Top Achiever

Doctoral Scholarship.

http://wikipedia-miner.sourceforge.net/index.htm

www.nzdl.org/wikification/about.html

Looking for information on the web can

be like looking for a needle in a haystack –

particularly if you don’t know

exactly what you are looking for.

Smarter searching with Wikipedia

Research Case Study


“Automatic translation is a key

way to increase the visibility

of minority languages.”

Dr Te Taka Keegan

The University of Waikato’s Dr Te Taka Keegan is on a mission to

revitalise Te Reo Māori – and to do it, he’s harnessing the

power of the internet.

Dr Keegan has worked with Google to research how computer

aided translation tools can be used to revive minority languages

such as Māori, and he’s used the Google Translator Toolkit to

upload Māori translations of English texts for anyone to access.

“With this tool, we can actually uplift our language,” says

Dr Keegan. “For us, it is about saving our language from

extinction. We are trying to help our culture survive.”

At the same time, Dr Keegan’s work is helping to develop the

Translator Toolkit to increase the number of languages that

Google can translate automatically. Thanks to his efforts,

Te Reo Māori is now one of those languages.

“Automatic translation is a key way to increase the visibility

of minority languages,” says Dr Keegan. “Because computer-

aided translation can improve translation speed and quality,

translators become more productive. These human translations

in turn feed into improving the automatic translation

algorithms, creating a virtuous circle.”

Dr Keegan has also been involved in a project to put online an

historical collection of Māori language newspapers using the

Greenstone Digital Library software developed at Waikato.

Supported by the Google Visiting Faculty Program.

Te Reo boosted by computer-aided translation


Research Case Study

Cyber security is big business these days, and one of

the University of Waikato’s top commercialisation

success stories is a global leader in the field.

Cyber security is big business these days, and one of the

University of Waikato’s top commercialisation success stories

is a global leader in the field.

Endace provides high-performance network security, traffic

analysis, latency measurement and application acceleration

solutions that capture, inspect and report on every single

data packet.

Since its launch in 2001, the company has built up an elite

worldwide client base of blue chip corporations, government

agencies and telecommunications providers that rely on their

data networks to do business. It was the first New Zealand

company to list on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of

the London Stock Exchange in 2005, and features in the TIN100

list of leading technology businesses.

Endace’s core technology for ‘listening in’ to computer

networks was initially developed by a Waikato research team

led by Professor Ian Graham in the Department of Computer

Science between 1995 and 2001. Waikato PhD graduates

continue to make up a sizeable proportion of the company’s

Hamilton-based crack R&D team.

Endace has celebrated its tenth anniversary having secured nearly

$11 million in government development funding from Technology

NZ and through a three-year Technology Development Grant,

a new government initiative to increase business investment in

R&D in the high-value manufacturing sector.

The funding will enable Endace to further develop its ultra-high

performance packet capture and analysis systems, designed to

give its customers the ‘power to see all’.

www.endace.com

Cyber security software a global winner


Research Case Study

Global collaboration

is at the heart of the

WAND Network

Research Group.

Collaborative work is at the heart of the WAND Network

Research Group at the University of Waikato.

WAND works closely with a range of international partners,

including the network measurement group CAIDA (Cooperative

Association for Internet Data Analysis), based at the San Diego

Supercomputer Centre at the University of California San Diego.

Work with CAIDA has led to the development of a series of

DAG network measurement cards, the original technology

behind WAND’s highly successful commercial spin-off Endace.

WAND also hosts one of the few active measurement systems

outside of the US mainland on CAIDA’s behalf, and has

significantly developed the system for use in New Zealand.

Another major collaboration is with the Amsterdam-based RIPE

Network Coordination Centre. Professor Tony McGregor and

Dr Richard Nelson are working with researchers there on the

Test Traffic Measurements project which delivers data on

internet traffic flow on a daily basis.

WAND hosts one of about 50 systems currently in the field,

and provides research access to commercial internet traffic

data through the Waikato Internet Traffic Storage archives.

Supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/wand/wits/index.html

Network measurement goes global


Research Case Study

They’ve been described as the telephone numbers of the

internet, but the original stock of more than four billion unique

Internet Protocol (IP) addresses has now run out.

They’ve been described as the telephone numbers of the

internet, but the original stock of more than four billion unique

Internet Protocol (IP) addresses has now run out.

This means network operators will need to transition users from

the old IPv4 system to the new IPv6 system, which has a much

larger address space.

However, the two systems are largely incompatible at the

packet level, and translation between them faces a number of

practical difficulties which has slowed the introduction of IPv6.

The University of Waikato’s WAND Network Research Group

has been investigating ways to ensure the transition process

runs smoothly, and Honours graduate Ben Stasiewicz has come

up with a set of ground-breaking tests to show that it can.

For his Honours project, Ben looked at the reliability of Path

MTU Discovery (PMTUD), an essential ingredient in running the

new IPv6 process.

“Some organisations are already making the transition to IPv6 but

there are many people in the industry who think PMTUD in IPv6 is

unreliable,” says Ben, who worked under the direction of WAND’s

Dr Matthew Luckie. “I wrote some software that implemented

the protocol and conducted tests to many IPv6-enabled servers

around the world to assess whether this is the case.”

It’s the first time testing like this has been done with IPv6, and

there has been considerable international interest within the

industry in Ben’s findings which show the process is no less

reliable than with IPv4.

Keeping the internet running smoothly


Research Case Study

Control systems engineers are finding formal methods in

computer science a fruitful field for collaborative work on better

ways to verify the correct behaviour of complex systems.

Control systems engineers are finding formal methods in

computer science a fruitful field for collaborative work on

better ways to verify the correct behaviour of complex systems.

One such collaboration is between Dr Robi Malik of the Formal

Methods Group at the University of Waikato and researchers at

Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.

The Chalmers team has created the Supremica software,

designed for modelling control functions for large-scale

manufacturing, while at the Waikato end Dr Malik and research

students have developed a front-end toolkit for Supremica, called

WATERS (Waikato Analysis Tool for Events in Reactive Systems).

“WATERS allows us to model complex finite-state machine

models for safety-critical operations,” says Dr Malik.

“It creates a graphical model of the software in action,

and allows push-button verification of the model.”

Supremica and WATERS are available to software developers

through the University of Waikato’s Centre for Open Software

Innovation, and the tools have been used in Sweden for

modelling manufacturing systems for Volvo and General Motors.

Engineers turn to formal methods to model complex systems

www.supremica.org

http://cosi.cms.waikato.ac.nz/projects/data/waters-the-waikato-analysis-tool-for-events-in-reactive-systems


Research Case Study

When complex

systems fail,

the impact can be

catastrophic.

When complex systems fail, the impact can be catastrophic.

Whether it’s a global airline booking system or a missile control

system, we have all come to expect reliable software. But in

fact very little of the software we currently use comes with

a fail-safe guarantee.

Researchers in the Formal Methods Group at the University of

Waikato are working on ways to make that guarantee a reality.

They work at the abstract end of computer science, creating

complex mathematical models that can be formally proven in

order to test software even before it has been written.

One project is focusing on new ways to test both the

underlying software and the user interface (UI), which are

traditionally treated as separate entities.

Dr Judy Bowen and Professor Steve Reeves have developed

Presentation Interaction Models (PIMs) which are particularly

useful for analysing web-based software where the UI drives

the content. The researchers have built an editing tool, PIMed,

which can be used to ‘reverse engineer’ a piece of software and

generate appropriate tests.

The tool has been trialled on telecoms software for registering

subscribers’ SIM cards. Using PIMed, the researchers identified

previously unknown errors, leading to an improved design.

The next step is to trial the tool on a larger software system.

Another project has the ambitious goal of developing a high-

level description, or metatheory, much easier.

“Computer hardware technology has raced ahead of software

technology,” says Dr David Streader. “The most commonly used

programming languages are state-based which means they

are good at handling complex data but they are not so good

for concurrent processes or for devices that respond to events,

such as mobile phones.”

Together with Professor Steve Reeves, Dr Streader is looking

at ways to synthesise and translate between the two systems,

and provide a robust yet flexible theoretical platform for new

programming languages which are able to handle and verify

both data and event-driven systems.

Supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and a

Tertiary Education Commission BuildIT Fellowship.

Making software reliability a reality


Research Case Study

In today’s digital world,

a screen-based learning

environment is becoming

increasingly common.

In today’s digital world, a screen-based learning environment

is becoming increasingly common, and for children learning

to read, there’s a whole wealth of material online that goes

beyond the traditional Janet and John readers.

But what works best for these learners in an on-screen

environment? Computer graphic design experts at the University

of Waikato are involved in a research project to find out more

about the factors that help or hinder on-screen reading.

Nicholas Vanderschantz and Claire Timpany are collaborating

with Dr David Whitehead and Wendy Carss from the

Faculty of Education to look at how text and background

colour can influence errors and self-corrections in children’s

on-screen reading.

“Initial experiments we’ve done with young readers shows that

colour combinations in children’s on-screen reading material

can affect their ability to read text,” says Mr Vanderschantz.

“We’re now collecting more data, with a specific focus on

context – we want to find out what differences readers

encounter in processing and comprehending a list of words as

compared to text in sentences and paragraphs.”

Ultimately the researchers hope to come up with guidelines for

designers and educators to create appropriate online material

for learner readers.

Does colour influence digital readability?


Research Case Study

Understanding the causes of solar flares would not only give us

greater warning of their occurrence, but could also provide the

key to one of science’s holy grails – fusion energy.

On March 13, 1989 the entire Canadian province of Quebec

– home to six million people – suffered a power black-out for

eight hours in sub-zero temperatures after a solar flare caused

a vital capacitor on the power grid to fail. The outage sparked a

disastrous sequence of events costing tens of millions of dollars.

Solar flares are the biggest explosions in the solar system,

unleashing the equivalent of a billion megatons of TNT in

seconds and showering the earth with x-rays and gamma rays

that disrupt satellite-based telecommunication systems and

cause power surges in the world’s electrical grids.

Understanding the causes of solar flares would not only give us

greater warning of their occurrence, but could also provide the

key to one of science’s holy grails – fusion energy.

Mathematicians like Waikato’s Professor Ian Craig, Associate

Professor Sean Oughton and Dr Yuri Litvinenko are working

at the cutting edge of astrophysics. They’re developing

mathematical models to explain the dynamic nature of the

magnetic fields that rise to the surface of the sun, causing

sunspots that store and release energy – sometimes quietly,

and sometimes explosively in a solar flare.

Supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund and the

Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Unlocking the secrets of the sun’s energy


Research Case Study

A craze for sudoku has swept the

world in recent years, but the

number puzzle has a long history.

A craze for sudoku has swept the world in recent years, but

the number puzzle has a long history. It’s a form of Latin

Square, the name given to combinatorial designs used by

mathematicians as a principal tool in the design of efficient

statistical experiments.

Dr Nick Cavenagh is a world expert in the field of

combinatorics, and has a specialist interest in Latin Squares.

“They are used all the time by statisticians to minimise

experimental error, particularly when many different factors are

influencing the data,” he says.

“For example, it can be very expensive to conduct experiments

to see how a range of chemicals interact with each other, but

using combinatorial designs you can test lots of interactions at

once in the most efficient way.”

Dr Cavenagh is currently working on ways to compare the

security and storability of combinatorial designs of different

types, by analysing their defining sets – the set of numbers which

uniquely determine a specific design.

“Latin Squares are used in some cryptographic systems and

for data storage, so we are developing a new measure of what

I’ve called surety to indicate how secure a system is and how

efficiently it can be stored.”

It’s conjectured that Latin Squares have surety equal to one-

quarter -- that is, the design can be uniquely determined if you

know at least one-quarter of all the cells – but as yet no formal

proof is available.

“We expect to discover new relationships between designs

with the same surety, and explore the effects on surety of

small changes to different types of combinatorial designs,”

says Dr Cavenagh. “This is fundamental research, which will

help applied researchers to make more informed decisions.”

Key to puzzle poses mathematical conundrum


Research Case Study

Clever use of statistics is helping to keep

a small island off New Zealand’s

southernmost tip rat-free.

Clever use of statistics is helping to keep a small island off

New Zealand’s southernmost tip rat-free.

Pearl Island is the first island in the world where simultaneous

eradication of all three invasive rat species has been attempted,

but subsequent monitoring detected the presence of rats nine

months after the initial eradication.

The question for the ecologists was: were these rats survivors

from the original rat population or had they reinvaded from

nearby Stewart Island?

By analysing genetic material from captured rats, a team of

statisticians including Dr Steven Miller from the University of

Waikato found they were likely to be reinvaders, which suggested

that while the initial eradication had been successful, rats were

swimming to Pearl Island at a much greater rate than anticipated.

“Using DNA profiling is much easier than relying on physical

tagging to identify rats,” says Dr Miller. “But there’s lots of

uncertainty when you’re matching genetics of different

populations, and this is where statistics comes in handy.

“You’re weighing up probabilities to determine the best

management strategy. One of the most successful rat

eradication programmes has been in the Bay of Islands where

genetic analysis contributed to the decision to tackle rats

on all the islands at the same time.”

Statistics proves secret weapon in fight against invasive species



The Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences works with

a broad range of industry, business and government organisations,

and we are always keen to establish new partnerships.

Want To Know More?

We are happy to come to you and talk in more detail about

your needs and opportunities, and how our work could

contribute. If you are interested in meeting please contact:

Shane Stuart

Research Developer

Email: [email protected]

Ph: +64 (0) 21 766 823

Graduate and postgraduate research enquiries should be directed to:

CoMputer sCIenCe & CoMputer GraphIC DesIGn

Professor Ian Witten

Associate Professor Eibe Frank


Ph: +64 7 838 4021

MatheMatICs

Professor Ian Craig

Dr Tim Stokes


Ph: +64 7 838 4713

statIstICs

Dr Lyn Hunt


Ph: +64 7 838 4038

Or to find out more about any of our work check

out our website: www.scms.waikato.ac.nz


I n s p I r a t I o n . E x p l o r a t I o n . I n n o va t I o n .

©the university of Waikato, august 2011.

The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 hamilton 3240, new Zealand toll Free: 0800 WaIKato

email: [email protected] Website: www.waikato.ac.nz

Faculty of Computing & Mathematical Sciences Phone: +64 7 838 4322 Fax: +64 7 838 4155 toll Free: 0800 924 528

email: [email protected] Website: www.scms.waikato.ac.nz

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