Making computer science accessible: apply now for 2012 CS4HS Grants

Working with micro-controllers at UQ’s worskhop.

The need for computer science professionals is increasing faster than universities are able to graduate CS students -- not just in Australia and New Zealand, but around the world. That’s why Google has worked with universities around the world to develop the CS4HS program: Computer Science for High School.

CS4HS is an initiative sponsored by Google to promote Computer Science and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curriculum. The program takes a “train the trainer” approach. Universities develop 2-3 day workshops for teachers that provide training, tips, and actual classroom materials to help them teach programming and computing in their schools and turn their students into computational thinkers and creators.

This summer five CS4HS workshops were held in Australia and New Zealand, at University of Melbourne, University of Canterbury, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Queensland, and University of Adelaide. University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney will hold theirs in the coming weeks. Over 200 teachers have:

• learned about programming software directly from developers, full-time CS faculty, and Google engineers;
• participated in hands-on workshops ranging from robotics programming to mobile app development with App Inventor;
• attended informational talks by industry leaders; and
• discussed new and emerging CS curricula at the high school and middle school level.

CS4HS participants and tutors at the University of Queensland’s workshop.

This sort of training is especially helpful for the surprising number of teachers in Australia and New Zealand who are devoting their own free time to offering computer science classes as a club or an extra course outside of the school’s primary curriculum.

Professor Paul Strooper, Head of the School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, said, “The CS4HS program was a huge success for UQ since the funding enabled us to develop three new hands-on computer science workshops for high schools which we are hoping to deliver to groups of students throughout the year. We used part of the funding to offer travel grants which enabled 15 teachers from all over Queensland and as far as Sydney to attend the CS4HS Workshop. Participating teachers from the Brisbane area have already started contacting us to organise workshops for their students at UQ and we are planning to visit the teachers from Mackay later in the year to run workshops for their students.”

From now until 3rd March 2012, CS4HS is accepting applications for 2012 grants; if you’re affiliated with a college or university in Australia or New Zealand, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re not affiliated with a college or university you can still encourage your local university, community college or technical school to apply for a grant. After applications close, we’ll post the workshop websites of participating schools on cs4hs.com for professors looking for ideas and for teachers interested in learning more about what’s being offered.

Posted by Sally-Ann Williams, Program Manager Engineering, Google Australia

Eureka Prize Winner Announced

Last night Associate Professor David Moss from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney was announced as the winner of the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.

Associate Professor Moss was awarded the prize for his work in incorporating light onto silicon computer chips. This groundbreaking work has led to the development of a laser that allows light to be generated on silicon chips, which overcomes many energy and bandwidth obstacles for on-chip and chip-to-chip communications.

Associate Professor Moss was joined at last night’s Eureka Prize dinner by finalists who submitted excellent entries:

• Professor Gerwin Klein, SEL4 Project Team from NICTA, have created the first general purpose operating system kernel with a machine checked formal proof of correctness, covering high level security properties down to low level code.
• Professor Rajkumar Buyya, The Cloudbus Project from the University of Melbourne, who have developed architectural principles and software technologies that enable high-performance, scalable, and energy-efficient Cloud computing.

I would like to thank all the people and teams who entered the prize and to congratulate Associate Professor Moss for his work.

Google Australia is delighted to sponsor the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. We’re passionately committed to promoting innovation in computer science here in Australia and we believe that it creates great benefits for society.

Posted by Ben Appleton, Software Engineer

Want to win an Anita Borg Scholarship?

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her life to revolutionising the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. In honour of Anita's vision, we established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004, awarding scholarships to women who share her passion for technology. Once again, Google is proud to announce the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Australia and New Zealand.



Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and demonstrated leadership. A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. Each scholar recipient will receive a $5,000 AUD scholarship towards the following academic year. In addition all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google’s Sydney Engineering centre.

Who can apply?

Applicants must satisfy all of the following criteria to be eligible:

• Be a female student at an Australian or New Zealand university who has completed one or more years of a Bachelors degree with at least one year of study remaining, whether as part of a Bachelors or postgraduate degree.
• Be enrolled in full-time undergraduate or postgraduate study at an university or equivalent tertiary institution (please see FAQ for details) in Australia or New Zealand for the following year.
• Be studying Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, or a closely related technical field.

Citizens, permanent residents, and international students are eligible to apply. Past applicants and finalists are also encouraged to re-apply. If you have any questions, please email anitaborgscholarsanz@google.com.



For further information on this scholarship and how to apply, check out www.google.com.au/anitaborg .

Deadline to apply: July 31st, 2011.



Thank you for your support and good luck to applicants!

Girl Geek Dinner at Google: Pink Optional

This is a guest post by Kellie Scott, Geek Girl Dinner Organiser, Sydney.



Last week, we held our quarterly Girl Geek Dinner at Google. These dinners were first started in London in 2005 by the original Girl Geek, Sarah Blow. As a software engineer, Sarah was sick of everyone at tech events assuming that she wasn’t an engineer; after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. These dinners are an opportunity for women who are passionate about tech to meet each other, hear about new ideas and generally to geek out together.

Aside from everyone receiving a “I'm a woman in tech. That doesn't mean everything has to be pink” sticker, which was a big hit, we enjoyed a tasty sit-down dinner with drinks, fun icebreaker games and as always, interesting talks. The event held together by the brilliant MC skills of Amaya “that goth chick that works at Google” Booker.

The keynote speaker was Mary Gardiner talking about her work for newly-founded non-profit organisation The Ada Initiative which supports women in open technology and culture. Mary’s talk engaged the audience with some surprising statistics about the participation of women in open source communities and she discussed why it is important to increase the proportion of women in open technology and culture, before focusing on the Ada Initiative’s plans for addressing the problem. For more information, and to find out how getting women involved can change the culture of the open source community, check out her talk on the Ada Initiative website.



After dinner, we moved into our lightning talks section - talks of (roughly) five minutes each, on a variety of topics. The first talk by Kirsti Rawstron discussed gender streaming and the way it is affected by course costs. Googler Alice Boxhall followed, with a general introduction to website accessibility. Alice demonstrated a couple of websites through ChromeVox to show how hard it can be for a blind person to navigate the web. To wrap up, Googler Katie Bell spoke about the National Computer Science Summer School, and Girls Programming Network, demonstrating that it does pay to get girls into programming from a younger age. All of the talks are available here.

Girl Geek Dinner continues to grow here in Australia with other groups in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. Our next Girl Geek Dinner will be held on Thursday 8th September. For more information please sign up here and follow us on Twitter here: @GGDSydney.

Eureka Prize Winner for Innovation in Computer Science 2010

This evening Professor Peter Stuckey from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne was announced as the winner of the inaugural Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. Robotics pioneer, Prof Rodney Brooks, presented the prize.

Professor Stuckey was awarded the prize for his development of Lazy Clause generation, a software method for combinatorial optimisation which solves mathematical challenges of resource allocation significantly faster than any other existing method. Professor Stuckey’s innovation will have great benefit for solving big problems in society at lower cost from the classic Travelling Salesman Problem (every CS grad will remember this one - given a list of cities and the distance between every combination of cities, the task is to find the shortest possible tour for a salesman wishing to visit each city only once) through to train timetables, water usage allocation, and hospital staff rosters.

Professor Stuckey was joined at tonight’s Eureka Prize dinner by finalists who submitted excellent entries:

• Associate Professor David Moss, University of Sydney, for his invention of a laser optical source with multiple wavelengths that can be used to transmit information optically over existing silicon (CMOS) integrated circuits.
• The Cloudbus Project from the University of Melbourne, which has developed architectural principles and software technologies that enable high-performance, scalable, and energy-efficient Cloud computing.

I would like to thank all the people and teams who entered the prize and to congratulate Professor Stuckey for his work.

Google Australia is delighted to sponsor the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. We’re passionately committed to promoting innovation in computer science here in Australia and we believe that the impact of computer science creates great benefits for society.


Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand

Eureka! New Google Australia Eureka prize for computer science

I'm excited to announce the inaugural Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. The $10,000 prize will be awarded annually to an individual or team of Aussies who demonstrate real innovation in computer science.

Each year, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes reward excellence in research and innovation, science leadership, school science, and science journalism and communication. Google is delighted to sponsor a new category as part of the Eureka awards.

Here at Google we're passionately committed to innovation in computer science. We hope that by encouraging future generations to embrace the power of an IT education now, we'll foster our next generation of innovators. As part of our ongoing support, we have set up other grants including the 2010 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship which is aimed at helping Australian women become global IT leaders.

Entries in the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science should be cutting-edge and represent a tangible advance in their field. The winning innovation will have the potential to improve the lives of many other Australians.

You can enter as an individual or as a team, and your submission can take the form of a research contribution, commercial product or completely private work such as an open source development.

Enter online here and submit your form along with your supporting documents before midnight AEST Friday May 7, 2010.

Best of luck!

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand