Tim Miller's Home Page

Tim Miller


About Me
 

Links  

About me

Research Students

Grants

Academic Activities

Publications

Teaching

Community Z Tools

Contact Details

 


I am a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne.

My main research interests are high-integrity software engineering, verification, complex systems, and intelligent agents, specifically:
You can learn more about my research by reading the papers on my publications page.

I did my PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia, supervised by Paul Strooper. My PhD was titled "Using Specification Animation to support Specification Testing and Software Testing". Details of the project can be found here.

Following this, I did a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. I was funded by the PIPS project (Personalised Information Platform for Health and Life Services), which aims to develop an eHealth system that is personalised to the user. My part of the project was specifying and designing part of a multi-agent system for supporting complex decision making.

Research students

I currently supervise the following research postgraduate students: I will be leaving the University of Melbourne at the end of 2012, so I am not recruiting any new postgraduate students.

Grants

2010-2012 ARC Linkage Grant (with RMIT): Integrating and Automating Testing in Multi-agent Systems Development $230 000
2008-2010 Early-career researcher grant (University of Melbourne): Intelligent reasoning in agent interaction $21 800

Academic Activites

CAT Market Design Competition

In 2010, I was appointed as the GameMaster of the CAT Automated Market Design Tournament. In this game, entrants compete by defining automated rules for matching buyers and sellers in a commodities market. Entrants compete against each other in attracting buyers and sellers and making profits. This is achieved by having effective matching rules and setting appropriate fees that are a good trade-off between making profit and attracting traders. The competition this year will take place between June 2 - 8, 2010, in conjunction with TAC Trading Agent competitions.

Program Committees

I am regularly on the program committee of the following:

Teaching

In my teaching, I make regular use of problem-based learning, both in the classroom and as part of project work. I have found this to be an effective way to engage students with material, and to help students to learn to construct their own theories and methods. I have been awarded the following teaching awards at Melbourne: In 2011 I will be teaching the following subjects: My consultation hours for semester 2, 2011 are:
Community Z Tools

The Community Z Tools (CZT) project is an open-source effort to build a set of support tools written in Java for the Z specification language, such as a parser, typchecker, and animator, so that others can build their own tools on top of them. The version of Z that CZT supports is the new standardised version of Z (see here for details of the standard). My involvment in the project so far has been to write the parser (Petra Malik then did a lot of tidying up!), which also parses Object-Z, and to write the typecheckers. Both the Z and Object-Z typecheckers are currently available in CZT release 1.0, released in July, 2007.

Version 1.0 of the Object-Z typechecker is available for download here as a standalone jar file. Documentation is not yet available, but the scheduler (in Z) and binary tree (in Object-Z) examples should give people a rough idea as to the markup and format that the typechecker expects. To run the typechecker, you will need a JVM capable of running Java 1.6 (or 6.0 as it is sometimes known) bytecode. Typechecking a specification can be done directly from the jar file like so:
    java -jar czt_typecheck_v1.0.jar filename1 filename2 ...
If you want to typecheck specifications that have been maintained for the Wizard typechecker, then simply include the "wizard" toolkit in the parents of you specification, like so:
    \begin{zsection}
      \SECTION MySpecification \parents wizard
    \end{zsection}
This provides backward compatability with Wizard for most of the Latex markup, but not the syntax and typing rules that may have changed in both Z and Object-Z since Wizard was released.

Any bug reports can be submitted via the CZT bug tracker on sourceforge. Please assign the bug to me. If the bug tracker is causing you problems, then please email me directly (my address is at the bottom of this page).

For more information about the CZT project, visit the webpage: http://czt.sourceforge.net/

Contact Details

    Tim Miller
    Department of Computing and Information Systems
    University of Melbourne
    Victoria 3010, Australia

    Email: my email address is tmiller followed by unimelb.edu.au