A 2-day event entitled "Computer Science @ Crossroads" was organized by the Department on 31 August - 1 September 2009, during which two renowned speakers were invited to give distinguished lectures, and also marked the 10th Postgraduate Research Symposium of the Department.
Ms. Jenny Li, a seasoned practitioner from the IBM System and Technology Group in Poughkeepsie, NY, holding 5 US issued patents and more than 40 pending patents in the areas of Contextual Collaboration, RFID, Wireless Network, Virtual Universe, Green Data Center, etc. delivered a Keynote Talk on "You Can Build a Smarter Planet".
Prof. David Lorge Parnas presented a Distinguished Lecture on "How Precise Documentation Allows Information Hiding to Reduce Software Complexity and Increase its Agility". Prof. Parnas is highly regarded as one of the grandmasters in Software Engineering. He has developed and demonstrated many groundbreaking ideas; all of them have provided the very foundation for modern software theory and practice. Prof. Parnas has won over 20 awards, including the one-time IEEE Computer Society 60th Anniversary Award. He received his honorary doctorates from the ETH in Zurich (Switzerland), the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), and the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, ACM, Canadian Academy of Engineering, GI in Germany, and the IEEE. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Prof. Parnas is presently Professor Emeritus at McMaster University in Canada, and the University of Limerick in Ireland.
Apart from the Distinguished Lecture, Prof. Parnas also shared his experience with the research postgraduate students and had dialogue with the faculty members on the curriculum development, as well as presented the Best Paper and Best Presentation Awards at the Postgraduate Research Symposium.
