Research in Hamilton

In Hamilton, the goals of science - to further human knowledge, and to frustrate bureaucrats - are chiefly served by two institutions, the Ruakura Agricultural research centre, and The University of Waikato. Each has its specialties, of which I am largely ignorant. Luckily, this is seldom an impediment to my writing, so it should not prevent you from forming strong opinions about the good work we do here.

Before I begin, let me describe for you the research environment in New Zealand.

The government has recently noticed that New Zealand depends altogether too much on selling actual products, and lacks a "knowledge economy". To remedy this dire situation, and create a "Bright Future" for us all, they plan to shift the emphasis in research funding to "Information and Communication Technology" specialists, who will develop the "know-ware" to take New Zealand into the 21st century.

Our department is the Department of Computer Science, and the staff, all of whom are "Information and Communication Technology" specialists, immediately embraced this concept. We feel we are already making progress toward know-ware, or know-progress as we like to call it. There have been calls to change the School motto from the rather dated "Where are you going?" to the forward-looking and technology oriented "We're making know-progress, and getting know-ware!"

We're confident that in a few years, all our graduates will have know-skills, and get know-jobs in the knowledge economy.

Ruakura is famous throughout Hamilton for putting windows into cows, and throughout the world for cloning cows.

No doubt you are wondering what good it does to put a window in a cow. If you stop and consider, however, you will realise that this is undoubtedly the reaction of the Luddites who scorned the first window to be installed in a wall. "What use is that?" they must have scoffed, little realising the savings they could make by switching their lights off during the daytime.

History has finally turned against them, and now it is rare to find an exterior wall that does not contain at least one window. Such widespread acceptance does not come quickly, however, and for the moment the good scientists of Ruakura remain innovators in a largely conservative field.

Controversial though this research may be, nobody can doubt the great benefits to humanity that cloning cows will bring. After all, we might one day run out of cows, and then where would we be?

Perhaps you are thinking that a bovine shortage is an unlikely scenario, at best? If so, you have obviously never heard of Lady, the last of the Enderby Island cattle. The last that is, until scientists at Ruakura added two more to the population: Derby the bull, born of artificial insemination, and Elsie the cow, a clone of Lady. Three more clones are expected in 1999, to the delight of cattle aficionados everywhere.

Since then, researchers at Ruakura have gone on to greater things: cloning Elizabeth, an adult Friesian, ten times. At last report Elizabeth, Liz, Beth, Bette, Bess, Lizabeth, Elize, Liza, Elissa, Lisa, and Lisette were doing well.

The University of Waikato has a full set of sciences, but since I'm a CMS student, I shall restrict myself to describing the Department of Computer Science.

Most of the work done around here falls in the province of one of our research projects. There are several of these, and if you're reading this page because you are thinking of attending the New Zealand Computer Science Graduate Students' Conference or visiting the department for some other reason, I suggest you look them up. Otherwise, I have prepared a list of highlights for you to admire.

The Machine Learning project frequently collaborates with Ruakura, and other cow-based research institutions: "The overall goal of this research program is to build a state-of-the-art facility for developing techniques of ML and to investigate their application to agriculture, a key area of the New Zealand economy."

The Warp group is trying to discover "how to harness the power of multi-processor systems." In layman's terms, this means they work on problems with spectacular names like TimeWarp and Warp Engine and ATM (which latter has little, as I understand it, to do with money machines).

One of the most active research groups (my opinion may be biased, since none of the others invite me to their meetings) is the New Zealand Digital Library Project, which has recently had the distinction of having its funding cut.

The NZDL provides a large and popular digital library service used by researchers worldwide; it pioneers full text searching, musical indexing, novel user interfaces, and gives away a plethora of supporting software; and it works with the United Nations, distributing information to subsistence economies throughout the third world, and universities throughout the first. Sadly, that's not the kind of research that gets funded in New Zealand - how can a local business make a buck out of all that?

But I'm not bitter. (I'm cynical.)

I have a friend at The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) over the back of the university, but all he seems to do is lark about in boats and planes while visiting the nicer parts of the country. Nice work if you can get it.

New Zealand Landcare Trust are building a big building over by NIWA, where they will presumably do the same sort of thing, but with tractors instead of boats.