postdoc position at the university of sydney

The University of Sydney is offering 10 postdoctoral fellowships in 2010.
short summary:

• up to 3 years,
• for phds awarded after 1-Jan-2004,
• research grant up to 25,000 aud, plus some relocation expenses
• salary around 72,000 aud
  (i think... that's USyd level A8 according to this pdf, linked from this page)
  
• fellowship might involve up to 6h per week of "other duties" (teaching)
• research proposal for the application is 4 pages

Applicants need to contact the Head of the proposed school/department before august 7 (for computer science that's sanjay chawla at hos@it.usyd.edu.au).
more details in this pdf.

Copying the announcement from the University of Sydney website:

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Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

CLOSING DATE TO RESEARCH OFFICE: 11 September 2009

Applicants must contact the Head of the host School/Department before 7 August 2009.

The University of Sydney Postdoctoral Fellowships were established in 1996 to support excellence in full-time research undertaken in any Department or School at the University. The University will be offering up to 10 new Fellowships in 2010. The Fellowships are extremely prestigious and highly competitive internationally in line with equivalent externally funded fellowships. Applicants must have an outstanding track record relative to opportunity in order to be short-listed. Successful applicants are expected to be based full-time at the University for the duration of the Fellowship and must not hold a concurrent paid appointment.

Eligibility

Strong preference will be given to applicants seeking to join the University from another organisation in Australia or from overseas. Applicants must have a PhD award dated no earlier than 1 January 2004.. Applicants with a Phd award dated later than 31 December 2008 are extremely unlikely to be competitive and should talk to the host Head of School to assess competitiveness before applying.
Applicants with a PhD awarded by the University of Sydney within the timeframe specified above may apply if they have held a position with another organisation subsequent to the award of their PhD. Applicants currently employed at the University of Sydney or other affiliated institutions (including but not limited to medical institutes) who commenced such employment after the award of their PhD AND on or after 1 July 2008 are eligible to apply.
Applicants wishing to clarify eligibility must submit a written request by 24 July 2009 to the Research Office. research@usyd.edu.auresearch[at]usyd.edu.au

Assessment Criteria

Excellence will be the primary criterion, both in terms of the project and the researcher. Equal weight will be given to the quality of the project and the track record of the applicant relative to opportunity. The alignment of the proposed research with existing activity and the environment in the host Department/School will also be an important consideration.

Journal of Computational Geometry

The Journal of Computational Geometry (jocg.org) is now accepting submissions.

Scope and Focus
The Journal of Computational Geometry (JoCG) is an international open access electronic journal devoted to original research of the highest quality in all aspects of computational geometry. JoCG publishes papers on the design and analysis of geometric algorithms, the complexity of geometric problems, experimental work on geometric algorithms, applications of computational geometry, and topics at the intersection of geometry and algorithms. Topics include metric space embeddings, graph drawing, computational topology, topological learning, meshing, compressed sensing, manifold learning, computer-aided design, discrete geometry, and combinatorial geometry. Outstanding survey papers in the area are also considered.

Editors-in-Chief
Ken Clarkson, IBM, United States
Günter Rote, Freie Universität Berlin

Editorial Board
Hee-Kap Ahn, Postech, Korea, Republic of
Oswin Aichholzer, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Nancy M. Amato, Texas A&M University, United States
Lars Arge, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Boris Aronov, Polytechnic University, United States
Mark de Berg, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands
Jean-Daniel Boissonnat, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France
Peter Brass, City College of New York, United States
Sergio Cabello, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Bernard Chazelle, Princeton University, United States
Otfried Cheong, KAIST, Korea, Republic Of
Ken Clarkson, IBM, United States
Tamal K. Dey, The Ohio State University, United States
Vida Dujmovic, Carleton University, Canada
Jeff Erickson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States
Hazel Everett, Université Nancy, France
Xavier Goaoc, INRIA, France
Anupam Gupta, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
Dan Halperin, Tel Aviv University, Israel
John Hershberger, Mentor Graphics, United States
Ferran Hurtado, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Piotr Indyk, MIT, United States
Marc van Kreveld, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Stefan Langerman, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Joseph S. B. Mitchell, Stony Brook University, United States
Günter Rote, Freie Universität Berlin
Christian Sohler, TU Dortmund, Germany
Takeshi Tokuyama, Tohoku University, Japan
Jan Vahrenhold, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany
Yusu Wang, The Ohio State University, United States
David R. Wood, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Managing Editors
Joachim Gudmundsson, NICTA, Australia
Pat Morin, Carleton University, Canada

CATS 2010

Call for Papers
CATS 2010 -- Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium
Brisbane, Australia, January 2010
http://cats.it.usyd.edu.au/

CATS (Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium) is an annual conference dedicated to theoretical computer science. In 2010, the 16th Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium will be held in Brisbane, Australia, January 18-21, 2010.

Authors are invited to submit papers that present original and unpublished research on topics including (but not limited to) the following areas: algorithms and data structures, complexity theory, graph theory, graph algorithms and combinatorics, semantics of programming languages, approximation and randomized algorithms, combinatorial optimization, formal program specification and transformation, computational geometry, algorithmic game theory, computational biology, logic and type systems, computability and new paradigms of computation.

Deadlines and other dates:
Paper submission deadline: Monday August 17, 2009
Acceptance notification: Monday October 5, 2009
Final version of accepted papers due: Monday November 2, 2009
Early registration: Monday December 7, 2009
Conference dates: January 18-21, 2010

The proceedings of this event will be published by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in the CRPIT Series (http://crpit.com/), and will also appear in the ACM digital library.

CATS 2010 is part of the Australasian Computer Society Week (ACSW), an international annual conference event, supported by the Computing Research and Education Association (CORE) in Australia. ACSW 2010 is hosted by the School of Information Technology at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, in January 2010.

For more information about CATS please visit http://cats.it.usyd.edu.au/
Contact: cats2010@easychair.org

The birth of a new CG journal

So we finally decided to start a new journal - Journal of Computational Geometry. After a lot of doubts and discussions back and forth we decided to send out invitations to colleagues asking them to join the editorial board. The responds has been amazingly positive. Even though a few declined they were all very supportive. The, almost finalized, editorial board can be found on the journal webpage (which is still under construction).

We hope to be ready to accept paper in a couple of weeks. More details to follow in a later post.

Should we start a free CG journal?

After a bit of work we believe we have solved most of the practical problems that have to be taken care of before starting a free journal. This is probably the easy part. Now we have to decide if it is a good idea or not.

The aim is to have a high quality journal for the CG community that is run by the CG community and free to everyone (really free, no cost to publish and no cost to access). Obviously such a journal needs the support of the CG community to be successful. The work should be shared among the community, i.e., the editorial board and editorial manager(s) should be replaced regularly.

Starting it would require a strong commitment from everyone involved (including the editorial board) for the first few years. So do we want a free CG journal? Please let us know what you think by commenting and/or filling in the poll.

You can select "Yes", "No" or "No, but someone else should". The third option is there to capture anyone that is positive to the idea but believes that he or someone else is better suited to do it. We're doing this with the aim to get a free journal in the community and if someone else wants to do it we would be happy to give our support.

Progress report 1: open CG journal

After a bit of work and a lot of help from Pat we've made some progress.

- The Open Journal System seems to be a usable journal management system (although far from optimal). To get it going one needs to rewrite most of the information pages and pre-prepared mails, but it's possible.

- The most suitable copyright agreement we could find is the Creative Common Attribution 3.0. The only restriction is "Whenever a work is copied or redistributed under a Creative Commons licence, credit must always be given to the creator.".

- We need a latex style file. Any suggestions on what needs to be included in the style file? Theorem-environments, paper size, font size, font, figures...

- Name of the journal? Any suggestions? Journal on Computational Geometry (JoCG)? When the name has been decided we can easily get a domain name and an ISSN.

Anything else?

A free CG journal?

For the last few years I've been discussing the possibility of setting up a free computational geometry journal with my colleagues. For me the two main reasons of having a free journal is the price we pay for a subscription (CGTA costs EUR 1,041/year) and the copyright transfer.

The idea would be to make the journal completely free which would require it to be as low maintenance as possible. The aim is to make the journal belong to the community and hence minimize the workload on individuals. How can this be achieved and what are the issues that must be considered?

• The journal should work as a traditional journal with the difference that papers are only published on-line and are free to access by anyone.
  
  
• The editorial board (including the Editors-in Chief) should be changed regularly. I believe 3-5 years is a reasonable time to serve as an editor.
  
  
• Fairly large editorial board, say 30 (reliable) researchers. Try to distribute the papers among the editors.
  
  
• The editors have to take greater responsibility throughout the process - from submission to publication. For example, the editor has to check that the final version is in the required format. One should also allow the editors to have more power, for example, if authors don't follow the stated procedures then the editor should have the right (within reason) to reject it, all to minimize work for the editors.
  
  
• Aim to only accept high quality research since this will decrease the number of submissions (at least in the long run). Since the journal isn't making any money it doesn't have to publish any issues if there are no papers accepted.
  
  
• Where to host it? If we buy a domain name then it doesn't really matter where we host it and we could move it if necessary. A domain name is cheap so this isn't a problem.
  
  
• Free Journal management systems are available. I played around with Open Journal Systems which might be adequate (needs to be investigated further).
  
  
• How to get ranked? If the journal is successful it will get ranked sooner or later. Is this a problem initially?
  
  
• Name of the journal? Suggestions?
  

It doesn't sound hard, but I'm sure I forgot lots of issues. Comments and ideas are highly appreciated.

2008 - the year of reviewing

The other day I thought about what I've been up to in 2008. Looking back I felt that I've been very busy but haven't had enough time for research. At the same time last year I had approximately 12 months of exciting "2008-time" in front of me to do something new and intersting, so how did I waste it:

- 1 month vacation
(I miss the 43 vacation days I had while doing my postdoc in the Netherlands...if it wasn't for the weather and the food I might even consider going back)

- I spent almost 2 months travelling (research visits and conferences).

- 2 months reviewing papers!!!
Yes it's true! I spent almost two months of 2008 reviewing papers. I'm sure you wonder how it can add up to two whole months. Well, I reviewed 9-10 journal papers. Each of them required 2-3 days of full time work (on average). I reviewed roughly 60 conference papers - each of them took 2-3 hours to review (on average). In total 25 days of journal reviewing and roughly the same amount of conference reviewing. Scary stuff! This is almost 20% of my work time in 2008! What do I have to show for it? Well, I actually got a free book from Springer (reviewing for DMKD) and a "Certificate of Recognition" from CGTA as a "Top reviewer"...Yeah!

This left me with 7 months for research, teaching and administration. Obviously this has to change in 2009. Either I decrease my vacation (don't think so) or the amount of time I spend on travelling and reviewing. If you read this far then you probably realised that this post is just a long excuse on why I have to turn down review requests in 2009.

- My four 2008 highlights were SWAT (I really enjoyed being the pc chair even though it took a lot of my time), Mohammad Farshi's and Damian Merrick's PhD graduations and that I had a record number of journal publications (7).

Happy New Year!