ACS WA 1962 Award Winners Announced

18th November 2020

Highlights

  • The 1962 Award recognises the contributions of Professor Dennis Moore who brought the first stored-program digital computer to WA 58 years ago.

Sam Heath – 1962 Prize winner

Sam graduated with First Class Honours in Computer Science and Software Engineering from UWA with excellent results. He is passionate about electronics with an interest in wireless networking protocols and he is especially excited about the Internet of Things (IoT).

His Honours thesis proposed an adaptive algorithm for selecting optimal parameters for implementing low power wide area networks. With the ability to cover large areas, these networks lend themselves to challenging remote environments such as in farming, where performing maintenance on a network is costly and time-consuming. Sam examined whether an adaptive protocol may be able to take advantage of changes in the local environment thereby lowering the transmitter’s energy consumption without sacrificing data throughput. This would in effect reduce the regularity of maintenance making these sensor networks more cost-effective and scalable.

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Dr Anupiya Nugaliyadde – 1962 Medal winner

Anupiya graduated with a PhD from Murdoch University. His thesis was Enhancing Natural Language Understanding using Meaning Representation and Deep Learning and he is a worthy winner of the 1962 Medal.

Deep learning enhances Natural Language Understanding (NLU) due to its capability of learning features directly from data, as well as learning from the dynamic nature of natural language. Furthermore, deep learning has shown to outperform most of the other machine learning approaches for NLU. His thesis demonstrates that by integrating semantic knowledge and a knowledge base, enhanced meaning and deep learning models are generated that improve the capability of NLU.

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