- Systems Research Group Manager

Paul graduated from Houston in 1971 with a BSc in electrical engineering and began working for Schlumberger, a multi-national company in the business of evaluating oil and gas wells using sophisticated electronic equipment. Among other positions, Paul managed computer-aided design systems and was DBA (database administrator) for product information systems. While still working, Paul completed his MSc in Computer Science in 1990 on Knowledge-Based Systems. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Otago as a lecturer in 1995, and completed a PhD in 2003.

Paul's current research is centred on cluster computing, distributed computing, networks, and operating systems. His teaching commitments include database courses, computer architecture/operating systems and computer networks. Paul is currently the managaer of the Systems Research Group.

email: werstein@cs.otago.ac.nz
Telephone: (64) 3 479 8534

Zhiyi Huang

Zhiyi has a BSc and a PhD in Computer Science from Changsha Institute of Technology (CIT), China. He worked in industry for four years. His interests include internet/parallel/distributed computing, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), parallel logic programming and parallel hypothetic reasoning. Zhiyi has also done some work in neural networks and pattern recognition. Zhiyi has some collaborative research interests with Griffith University, Australia.

You can find out more about Zhiyi from his personal homepage, here.

email: hzy@cs.otago.ac.nz
Telephone: (64) 3 479 5680

Ian McDonald

Ian originally trained as a teacher of Chemistry at Queens University in Belfast. While working as a secondary teacher, he developed an absorbing interest in computing which led to a PhD on computerised public health information systems. Ian arrived at Otago in 1980 as the third academic staff member in a very small department of Computer Science. He is the founder of the Database research group, and has been its director since 1990.

Ian's interests include temporal database systems, medical information systems and the database aspects of spatial information systems. Current teaching commitments are second, third and fourth year database courses. One of Ian's primary interests is the teaching of Computer Science - he was one of the original designers and implementors of the COMP101 course (1998 enrolment around 2000 students).

email: ian.mcdonald@cs.otago.ac.nz
Telephone: (64) 3 479 8587

Nathan Rountree

Nathan graduated from Otago University in 1994 with a music degree, then enrolled in a diploma for graduates in computer science. and is now finishing off his PhD, supervised by Ian McDonald and Anthony Robins. His project is centred around the integration of decision-tree classifiers with artificial neural networks for data mining. Nathan has joined the departmental staff as a Lecturer.

Nathan's teaching commitments include half of the 300 level software engineering paper (although not in 2002), half of the 200 level data structures and algorithms paper, some of the 100 level introduction to programming and topics in 400 level database. His current research involves using data mining techniques to identify features of successful students in the COMP103 introduction to programming course.

email: rountree@cs.otago.ac.nz
Telephone: (64) 3 479 5749