Contents ( in part ) :

Specials -	for people who just want information about something else. CHAPLAINCY NETWORK MEETINGS
Alan, in person -	Where I am; What I do; Curricula vitae ( not a spelling mistake ); Alan's virtues celebrated in literature; Auckland career in song. NEWS !
Alan, the computist -	My research interests; Notes for any potential collaborators; Notes for any potential research students; A list of research students who have worked with me; Alan's column How things were in Sigplan Notices; Publications ( a poor thing, but my own ); Unpublications - working notes, where I record this and that; Other technical preoccupations. Alan used to be editor of the SIGACCESS Newsletter; - and he also used to edit a column "How things were" in Sigplan Notices. Once I gave lectures ....
Alan, on the higher plane -	Link to the CHAPLAINCY NETWORK MEETINGS information ( WARNING : God is mentioned on some of these pages ); Some obsessions - or perhaps just opinions; Really Alan ( WARNING : God is not actually mentioned on the page you get to eventually, but is strongly implied ); Alan counts some of his blessings ( WARNING : God is mentioned on this page too ). NOTE on God : The several warnings which appear above are included for any readers of tender sensibilities, such as those in whose interests one of the Auckland Children's Hospitals with silly names refused to allow a group to present a play in which God appeared as a character. Their "excuse" was that there had been no warning that such a terrible thing might happen.

Finding me.

My postal address is :	Alan Creak, Computer Science Department, Auckland University, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand.
My electronic addresses are :	Telephone : 64 9 3737 599 ext 87265 Facsimile : 64 9 3737 453 Electronic mail : alan@cs.auckland.ac.nz
My real physical base location when I'm at the university is :	Room 303.371, Computer Science Department, on the university's city campus.
	( If you can't find me there, ask at the Computer Science Department Office. They might not know either, but they'll sympathise. )

My research interests are centred on Rehabilitation Computing. A brief definition : looking for ways in which people with disabilities can use computers to reduce their difficulties.

Apart from rehabilitation computing, I have difficulty in disengaging my interest in several other topics. ( WARNING : having a wide, and shifting, range of interests is lots of fun but no longer a good strategy for an academic. If you wish to achieve academic prominence, you should be very careful not to waste time thinking of anything outside your chosen field, which you should keep as small as possible. ) There's a list of some such topics which might or might not be up to date; several of the links below go to the same list rather more specifically, but in case you'd like to look at the whole lot, there it is.

The emphasis on favoured research topics might change a bit. I am pretty sure that rehabilitation will continue to top the list, but it is clear so far that having nothing to do mysteriously ensures that you have even less time to do it than you had before, so I haven't really got round to rehabilitation yet. Should I ever get that far, and, further, convince myself that I'm making some progress, two or three of the other long-standing topics might resurface, because there is unfinished business there. If you're interested in any topic, ask me. You'll probably find me quite easy to persuade. ( That is not unconnected with the phenomenon of the vanishing time. )

• Rehabilitation Computing :

  I don't know yet just how this is likely to develop ( except that a good adverb to bear in mind is "slowly" ). ( An even better one, judging by progress to date, is "never", but I live in hope. ) My present intention is to begin by concentrating on the development and application of Vocabulary Translation Analysis, which I can do on my own if I have to, but I shall need collaborators in due course when it comes to evaluating and applying the "theory".

  • Some theory : Vocabulary Translation Analysis ( VTA ), a method of system design for rehabilitation hardware and software.
  • Some practical : increasing bandwidth by using several output channels. This was the ground from which VTA sprang, but has not been worked over yet in real applications.
  • Some long shots : robots ( and other bits of hardware ) for rehabilitation. This topic includes one suggestion for a new sort of manipulator arm, and a strong feeling that small robots ( a few centimetres in size ) ought to be useful for something.
  • Some additional minor topics are described in the title page for this group.

• Real-time control languages :

  There are two lines of development under this heading, both concerned with control systems which could be distributed over several processors. They share the idea of a single system-wide high-level programme which is decomposed into segments which run on different processors. PFL was the first to start, and various students have added little bits from time to time. It has never had a real test, and I'd like to implement it properly once. PDL came much later, and has interested more people; it's rather less conventional in several ways, but doesn't get down to the fine detail of control in the way the PFL potentially does.

  • Developing PFL ( Process Formulation Language ) to the level of a working system would be of great interest, particularly in the partitioning of the single programme into several components, each operating on a virtual machine. Now that Java has made virtual machines acceptable, perhaps it might be a more attractive project.
  • The development of PDL ( Process Description Language ) has been carried further, and is looking very promising. There's a lot more to be done, but we do have some real experience in implementation now.
  • The treatment of administrative operations as real-time systems is a possibility which I've pondered for about 20 years, since the early days of PFL. Using PDL for document processing is interesting, and I'll be doing this as part of the administrative work ( described briefly on the PDL page ). I think the notion has potential beyond the immediate application of the department's handbooks, and many long-term administrative activities could be studied as slow real-time systems.

• Artificial intelligence :

  I've wanted to pursue several lines of investigation in artificial intelligence for a long time. ( It is possible that I was the first person to attempt to study artificial intelligence at Auckland University; I was already conducting research in applications to chemistry when I came here in 1973. Some day it might get far enough to be published. )

  • The uses of zero-order logic lie behind the other topics discussed below. I have a system that works, but it needs tidying a little before it's usable.
  • The problem of elucidating chemical reaction mechanisms is interesting; given experimental results, the task of choosing a set of elementary reactions which accounts for them satisfactorily is not straightforward. The methods available are various, depending on the sorts of information provided.
  • I would like to continue work begun some time ago on debate moderation. I became interested in possible involvement of computers in arguments after despairing at the irrational and inconsistent debates in parliament and the press about such matters as the Treaty of Waitangi. I don't expect that computers can offer much to the resolution of such arguments, but I think they can perform a service by helping to make clear the stupidity of many of the claims made.

• - and then there are all manner of curious little oddities, some left over from students' research activities, some offshoots from other topics, some just intriguing. This is very unlikely to be a complete list, and I reserve the right to do anything I want if it takes my fancy whether it's on the list or not.
  • Three sorts of analogue computer : Essentially the same programme can integrate an ordinary differential equation by traditional analogue simulation, by simulating a digital differential analyser, or as a Taylor series.
  • There are some interesting peculiarities about genetic algorithms that turned up in a student's master's research, and which I'd like to follow up a bit.
  • Many years ago, I made an information-storage-and-retrieval system called Croak. I want to make it go again - and I think it can be done with a PDL method like that for the handbooks.
  • I ( building on some work done a few years ago by students in the Robotics and Real-time Control course which I used to present ) wrote a simulator for blind people walking through a city. I'd like to use it. And to finish it off properly.

Cooperation.

Anyone interested in pursuing anything more or less vaguely connected with the topics above ( or practically anything, for that matter ) is very welcome to get in touch and discuss possibilities, whether for cooperation or just general interest.

Research students.

Anyone - student or otherwise - who wants to talk to me about his research is more than welcome to do so. I won't claim to give advice, but my opinions are free and often abundant.

Apart from that, a summary of what follows is "Sorry". While I am able in principle to supervise research students, I have finally, and with considerable regret, decided to do so no longer, unless there are very pressing arguments to the contrary.

In the past, I have had a lot of enjoyment, a lot of fun, and a lot of learning out of research supervision. Some, at least, of my students have been kind enough to say they thought I'd done it well from their point of view too. But that was in the old days, when academics were deemed to be honest, capable, and honourable people, and their students were similarly regarded as sensible, mature, and intelligent. Occasionally some of these assumptions might have been a bit shaky, but on the whole they worked pretty well, and we had ways of dealing with the exceptions.

Times have changed. We are now guilty until proved innocent, and the task of supervision is hedged with forms and regulations. None of these, perhaps, is excessively onerous in itself, but I don't want to do them, and I don't feel obliged to do so any longer. I should add in the interests of clarity that this isn't the students' fault; I've had some pretty odd students, but I can't remember any I didn't like, and they've all been enthusiastic about the research.

There are some other contributory reasons too. One of considerable weight is that over the years I have found that rather few students are really interested in my pet topics. As supervising students was part of the job, and with indefatigably high hopes, I have therefore taken on many students with interests which I could convince myself, rather too easily, were connected with things I wanted to do. While this has given me a lot of fun and experience in areas into which I would otherwise never have ventured, it just hasn't worked as a way of getting my research done, and has instead consumed vast amounts of time which I would have preferred to spend on my own work. ( One "very pressing argument" would be a desire to work on one of my preferred topics for its own sake, not because it happened to include something else that you wanted to do. )

I preserve for general interest a few pages of advice, comment, and reflection which I originally wrote for my research students. Occasional E-mail communications suggest that other people have found them helpful.

Other technical preoccupations.

The title for this part was originally "Other technical interests", but I thought I should be honest. An even better title might be "Unfinished business ( technical )", but there is such a lot which comes under that heading and has vanishingly small probability of ever being seriously thought of again, let alone finished, that I compromised with "preoccupations" - which is true enough.

The most serious of these preoccupations is operating systems, on which I lectured from 1985 to 1998, with two years off while on leave and the more than able collaboration of Robert Sheehan from 1989 on. Operating systems was never one of my interests, but someone had to do it, and that was me. I was profoundly unhappy with the conventional treatment of operating systems, which seems to me to have an intellectual content comparable to that of stamp collecting ( no, not philately ! ), so put a great deal of work into inventing an alternative. ( There is a report and a paper about the alternative treatment. ) This became the backbone of our course from about 1990, and the continuing preoccupation is an attempt to write a book on the subject following our new approach. This is going very slowly.

I had - and, I suppose, still have - a text-formatting programme called Regal ( because it's about rulers ). It's a mark-up system, rather like LaTeX, but far more versatile. ( Yes, I've read the LaTeX book, but Regal started long before then. Apart from that, "Regal" spelt backwards is "lager", which sounds more fun than "xetal". ) The method is based on analogies between formatting text streams and multiprogramming operating systems. I've been doing it as a secret hobby for some time, and I'd like to get it completed. The past tense appeared above because my experience of Regal has convinced me that there's a better way. Therefore, some day I intend to have a text-formatting programme called Imperial ( because it sounds better than Regal ). Almost the only visible evidence of Imperial is a working note, but it's a start.

Me, previously, at work.

My first computing interests ( apart from learning the trade ) were in artificial intelligence and programming languages. ( Most active involvement in these lines of research was squeezed out long ago by the demands of lecture courses in other topics, but if you've read this far from the top of the page, then ( a ) congratulations !, and ( b ) you'll have noticed that they are making a strong bid for reelection. ) I came to Auckland in 1973, when I took up a lectureship in the university's computer centre - this department had not been established at that time. Those obsessed with nitpicky historical detail can find a little more here - and there's a note on the university's old computers here ( someone asked for recollections, and I couldn't bear to throw it away ).

I moved from the computer centre to the Computer Science department in 1984, and I've been here ever since. In that sentence, "here" is to be interpreted loosely, for there have been two periods during which I've been elsewhere :

• I spent 1988 on sabbatical leave, based in the Cybernetics department at Reading University in England. There I learnt about neural networks, and also visited several centres dealing with rehabilitation matters to find out whether there was a subject which could be called something like rehabilitation computing, and which was sufficiently demanding to justify my taking it up as a research activity. There was; I did.

• I spent 1996 on sabbatical leave, based in the Computer Science department at York University, also in England. I was working in the Alternative Interfaces Group, a part of the HCI group, led by Alistair Edwards, and managed to investigate some imaginative uses of conventional computer keyboards for people with physical disabilities.

NEWS :

Me, not at work.

Alan Creak,
2007 December.