Our congratulations to the following people who have been awarded an Innovation Grant in the first round for 2008.

Seeding Grants

Kyle Buttress - Griffith University
Live web log analysis with real time visual representation.

Provide a platform for live log analysis of websites to common analysis of web servers as it happens. Make provisions for reading archived logs, to provide a "iive play back" analysis of web site traffic. This would need to allow for multiple format logs with an easily configurable analysis interface. Give the user a visual representation of the number of connections per second / per minute, size of data per connection, referrals. Allow for storage of analysed logs for reporting.

The visual aspects of the log analysis would include varying the size of a circle to represent request size, the number of circles represent the number of individual requests. Changes in colour to represent different file types. When the log analysis has completed, the user is prompted to create a printable version of the analysis.

Using the Cocoa-Ruby bridge it is intended to read web logs live on a system or read archived logs, and then provide a visual representation of traffic as it occurs. Ultimately having the ability show clients / management current access information, to this end developing a version for mobile devices would be of great benefit.

Dale Lawson- University of Queensland
iTLM (iTouch Lab Management)

The project I would like to develop and bring to fruition is a mobile iMac/PC Lab Manager based around the iTouch.. Via Safari, iTouch will allow lab mangers to remotely image, reboot any machine, any lab or even all labs. It will also allow the user to monitor the status of their labs. The application will query a mySQL database which keeps a record of each PC's status, and the present it to the lab manager in a usable format. With the use of iTouch, Lab manager's will can do all of these management tasks in the lab, or were ever they have wireless access.

Volker Kuchelmeister- University of New South Wales
Immersive Interactive Projection Environments using Quartz Composer and OpenGL

Using Quartz Composer Technology under Leopard, the intention is to further develop a framework for immersive interactive projection environments the iCinema Research Centre developed. One environment, the iDome, consists of a 3m upright dome, a spherical mirror and HD projector <http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/infra_dome.html>. It allows fisheye and equirectangular motion footage and stills to be projected into the dome. This environment covers a viewer peripheral vision which has a very strong feel of immersion.

A custom plug in for Quartz Composer is in development, in collaboration with Paul Bourke from University of Western Australia, to achieve the realtime OpenGL mesh distortion necessary. Based on this I intend to develop a flexible frame work with Quartz Composer to allow for user interaction, compositing of additional information layers into the projection, sound playback and synchronization across multiple computers.

Jonathon Manning - University of Tasmania
Industrial Strength Visual Programming for the OS X Desktop

I intend to develop an application development framework that takes inspiration from Dashboard and Automator and provides users with a visual way to develop full-fledged applications for the OS X desktop. When Automator was released with Tiger, it was a revolutionary reinterpretation of the pipes metaphor that had existed in Unix for decades. This method of automating repetitive or complex tasks is very fast, and very efficient, but is only capable of creating linear workflows.

What I propose to create takes inspiration from the discrete tasks of Automator, the connected-objects model from Quartz Composer, and a dash of help from Interface Builder simplicity. In essence, it is a visual programming environment in which users place feature objects in a working space (referred to as the Logic View), and connect them together to provide the backing logic for their application. The user can then flip the window around to view the interface that the end user of their application will see (known as the Interface View), and attach the appropriate interface controls (text fields, buttons, and so on). Finally, these two components can be augmented with a data store, which elements in the Logic View can connect to. These components - the data store, the Interface View’s controls, and the Logic View’s controls - make up the Model-View-Controller development paradigm that appears throughout Cocoa. Using these components, it is possible to quickly and efficiently construct all manner of applications for the desktop.

What separates this project from other attempts at visual programming is a relaxation of the notion that visual programming is applicable to every problem. Peter Deutsch, the creator of Ghostscript, has been quoted as saying that complex systems like operating systems cannot be constructed in a purely visual environment. This project sidesteps that issue by taking the position that application development is largely the manipulation of other, more complex systems, which are often written in other languages. To this end, components provided in the Logic View will be treated as loadable plugins that can be written in any language (Objective-C, Python and Ruby APIs will be provided) and can be of any complexity.

Alistair Campbell - Edith Cowan University
Digital Task Assessment

The project would explore and investigate the possible educational and learning enhancements that the digital recording of professional judgments could allow that were impossible, costly and/or time consuming when recorded on paper, such as, self and peer marking, moderation of samples of works. The design decisions would be user driven. The project involves the design and development of software for both students and markers to record their task assessment judgments electronically. This process would allow for the removal of the busy and unproductive (clerical) work involved in recording of judgments and the instant sharing of them. Further, individual and group feedback and feed-forward could be more focused and immediate.

FileMaker Pro would be used for rapid software development while Apple technologies both hardware and software will be used throughout the project both on the server side and the user side. The FileMaker Pro and Apple applications allows for web, runtime, server and stand-alone access to be developed and deployed seamless without high investment in IT support. The project would explore different input devices, such as the iPod touch, iPhone, laptops etc and the different means of sharing these judgments eg wireless, web.

Sam Thorogood - University of Sydney
Who am I: Files and their identities

This year, I'm undertaking Honours at the University of Sydney. My research topic involves systems for maintaining identity, uniqueness and freshness through time and over multiple loosely-coupled systems. In more functional terms, I aim to investigate and develop personal information management (PIM) systems that empower individual users with the ability to track the history and lineage of their own files over time. This information can actually be imagined as a "family tree" of files. Obviously, my research goals will be supported by a development project. I plan to release practical, unobtrusive tools that will enhance user experience, while utilising the Mac OS X Finder. These tools will provide users with up-to-date information about any specified file, including information on its parents, siblings and children - that is, in the form of the family tree analogy described.

To achieve these goals, I am intending to leverage various Apple technologies. First and foremost is the FSEvents filesystem notification events daemon, provided as part of Mac OS X Leopard, which I've determined can help me track changes - including notifications of renames, deletions, and is a technology I can also leverage to help determine other user actions taken on filesystems. Since I am targeting a low-level API, I also am not limited to tracking the usage of specific applications or tools. Secondly, to help determine the similarity of files that I cannot always formally observe, I aim to leverage Apple's Spotlight technologies, that benefit me through providing concise metadata on files that may be compared in order to determine file similarity (for instance, to determine whether a file e-mailed to a friend, before being returned with changes, has anything in common with previous files we are observing on our local system).