Welcome to the non-home page of Lee Naish

Dr. Lee Naish
Senior Lecturer
Department of Computing and Information Systems
University of Melbourne
Melbourne
Victoria 3010
Australia



E-mail: The heritage version, lee at cs.mu.oz.au still works but cs.mu.oz.au is unfortunately now deprecated; its safer to use unimelb.edu.au instead. Note that due to unmaintained local e-mail infrastructure and spam, I have reluctantly moved to another e-mail system. There is now a higher chance I'll read any e-mail you send to me. The downside is that Google will read it also, along with any reply I send. I miss the time when e-mail was fast, reliable, convenient and private.
WWW: http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~lee/ or my official impersonal page
Phone (department): +61 3 8344 1500
Phone (my office): +61 3 8344 1343
Fax: +61 3 9349 4596
Legs: Room 7.23, Doug McDonell - Building 168
Telex: Hey, its the third millennium! Who uses that obsolete technology nowadays? You don't really want my telex number do you? Oh. Ok, its AA 35185.
My PGP public key


This page is not under construction. It is finished, complete, perfect and faultless. /strong>

"Can I have Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, e-mail, Spam, news and Spam without the Spam?"

Note

As from the start of March 2000 I have been working half time due to health reasons. Unfortunately, my e-mail load didn't immediately drop by half and it is a major obstacle to getting other work done. In addition, I have become a father, causing somewhat of an e-mail backlog amongst other things. So, please direct enquiries as below. If you do send me e-mail, make sure the subject line and start don't look like spam - my "delete without looking further" threshold has been lowered. Weirdly encoded stuff, javascript, unreadable HTML, images, Micro$oft-dependent files etc generally go straight to /dev/null.
Topic Direct to
Fire breathing /dev/null
International student internships/studentships /dev/null
Spam /dev/null
Feel free to e-mail me for an appointment.

Research Interests

Ever since I was an undergraduate Computer Science student I have been fascinated by reasoning about program correctness, and this has been a central theme of my research ever since. It can be summed up by the following question.
How can we clarify the relationships between what we want a computer to do (which is in our head), the programs we write (syntactic objects), and what they make a computer do (a sequence of execution states, hopefully ending up with what we wanted)?
This has naturally lead to an interest in declarative programming languages: topics such as programming language design and implementation, declarative debugging (reasoning about incorrectness) and semantics.

I have also worked on debugging using program spectra (eg. data on what statements are executed in each of a set of passed or failed tests). This has lead to an interest in set similarity. For debugging, we expect the set of test cases which fail to be "similar" to the set of test cases which execute a buggy statement (more similar than for correct statements at least). More than a hundred different ways of measuring set similarity have been used and it is an important problem throughout science and is a special case for machine learning and data mining.

Other interests have included algorithm animation (the Algorithms In Action system), information economics and vote counting.

Interesting? You might like to take a look at some of my

The list of papers is sometimes a bit out of date. If you are a prospective PhD student I would be glad to hear from you, but please be as specific as possible about what research topic you are interested in.

I have some input into the supervision of the following postgraduate students:
Name Topic
James Zhang Computer-aided manufacturing
Dr. Peter Eckersley (flew the coop
but finally delivered - yay!) 		Information economics
Dr. Jason Lee (completed, his Thesis) Debugging using program spectra
Dr. Bernie Pope (completed, winner of the ACS
distinguished dissertation award for 2007) 		Declarative debugging of Haskell

Teaching

In 2013 I have involvement with the following subjects (at least there is a very good chance - things occasionally change with little notice). In the not too distant past I have also been involved with

Administration

Not my favourite topic, but I am definitely the best Privacy Liaison Officer the department has ever had. I'm also the publications coordinator for the department (this role even has a three letter acronym, though I have yet to find out what it stands for). I am looking forward to the time when we have a web page listing who is responsible for what in the department.

I also put in a submission to the 2005/2006 Review of the Faculty of Engineering.

Other

Yes, I do have a life... You might like to check out
Due to ammendment number 73 of 1996 of Regulation 8.1.R7 of The University of Melbourne I am compelled to include the following fascinating information: