Training and Learning Bonus for Postgraduate Scholarship Holders

As part Australian Government’s Household Stimulus Package, postgraduate scholarship holders are now also eligible for a one off payment of $950. More information can be found through centerlink:
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/individuals/hsp_postgrad.htm

Since scholarships are tax free, many students missed out on the regular $900 package as no tax was paid during the 2007-2008 fiancial year. Hoorah PhD friends, you can now get $950 ($50 more than regular folk)! Only catch that's made some fellow PhD colleagues ineligible yet again is the $20,427 lower bound on other/non APA/non APAI/non NHMRC scholarships. The Melbourne University Scholarships Office is emailing/has emailed letters of proof to scholarship recipients.

As for me, I received my $900 a couple of weeks ago; I worked for 4 months at Google during the 2007-2008 financial year, bumping me into the range where I was eligible for the regular stimulus incentive. I don't think I can receive two packages. Although, it doesn't explicitly exclude me as I am quite sure I did not receive a Training and Learning Bonus or a Back to School Bonus payment. I tried calling centrelink but the English lines are constantly busy and it felt like I was put on hold indefinitely on the multilingual/Chinese language lines.

Melbourne University Postgraduate Scholarships (local students)

Most people who do postgraduate research degrees at the University of Melbourne are on scholarships. More information can be found here. There's links there to apply online for the coming year. Deadlines are usually 31st October the previous year. The time line for local students can be found here and the international one is not too difficult to locate. There's different yet similar ones for international students. This entry will mostly talk about local students.

Depending on how fantastic you are and general area of research and personal situations, there are many types of scholarships to apply for. Generally, the most common one is the APA - Australian Postgraduate Award. It's about $19 000 per annum. No guarantees but if you get over 85 average, you're in with a good chance. Over 90, better chance. Less than those, not so good. In missing out on those, there are MRS, the Melbourne Research Scholarships. These are slightly less than the APA but are also about $19 000 per annum. People around the 85 mark who missed out on the APA might get a MRS.

You apply for the MRS and APA at the same time online. They prefer you to apply for enrolment as well. Although I have heard of students who have received scholarship but hadn't applied for the degree yet. Obviously they can't have the money until they enrol. I think they prefer you/force you to do it so it's easier on the paperwork.

MRS and APA are university wide. In computer science, another main source of funding that I had experience with is NICTA. In my year and the years before it, NICTA were quite generous with their scholarships (plentiful). The amount is also about $19 000 (maybe slightly less) if you missed out on a APA or MRS and about a $8000 top up if you got an APA or an MRS. These work in conjunction with MRS/APA. Applications for NICTA scholarships are separate from what I remember. If you get an APA/MRS, they are happy to give you a top up because they get some IP rights (you sell your research soul as some of my friends say). If you don't get an APA/MRS, they will give you just the normal $19 000 for your research IP. But starting last year, new NICTA recipients must also take some coursework. Not a lot, just maybe 1 a semester for each semester of your degree. Also NICTA is generous (monetary) with travel stipends. They cover a lot.

They are the common ones. The other ones are more dependant on your supervisor/project area. There are departmental scholarships and also APAI ones if you are interested in a project that a supervisor happens to have the funding for. These are usually made by private arrangement between the student and the supervisor and project that both parties are interested in that has been allocated funding. It usually has more to do with the supervisor. There's industry based scholarships as well. There are many different ways to arrange these. With my industry scholarship, the company contacted my supervisor because he was an expert in the area they wanted research in. And I was a student who was particularly interested in that area so it was a fit. There's usually more money involved with APAI and industry scholarships, about $25 000 to $30 000 per annum. Industry ones usually don't sit well with NICTA. Because both want IP and don't like to share. So for me, I chose industry and let my NICTA go. Depending on your industry, they may also have some travel allowance as well.

Top ups: as I mentioned before with NICTA, they give you top ups if you have MRS/APA. CSIRO can also offer the same deal but once again, it's often very project/supervisor dependent. You usually have to have a collaborator at CSIRO who is interested. CSIRO also doesn't work well with NICTA or industry (IP again).

All research students are entitled to department and graduate school funding. I've written more information about these types of funding here and here.

All PhD scholarships are tax free. And tuition is not really an issue. There are certain number of government places for research students and everyone I've ever know to do a research degree has been given a placement. So the learning is for free and you have enough to live on.

Poster Day

Every year, all postgrad researchers and early research staff are recommended to present a poster for Poster Day. Poster afternoon was on the 27th April and I returned to research on the 23rd April. The final copy was due while I was away so I submitted a copy of what I wanted printed and laminated before I left. It was a nice session for all the pgrad research students and some members of the research staff so they could display their work and have discussions. I got some interesting comments, especially about how access control can be ensured in P2P gaming environments. I will have a play of a P2P gaming technology to see what I think. I haven't had much experience with it.

Official PhD Student

This week I received notification of PhD confirmation.

The application for conversion from Masters to PhD stated 6-8 processing time. I needed to be confirmed before date of travel which was 11th April. Since I was not ready to convert before my leave in February, I had to do it immediately after my return for the 6-8 week allowance. However, I found out on Wednesday through the School of Graduate Studies that I have been confirmed. The confirmation process requires a departmental seminar, a conversion report, a progress report and a meeting with the student's committee (along with all the relevant forms). I fulfilled all the criteria and handed in the forms on 27th of February and on Wednesday, I went to SGS to discover that I have been confirmed on their records. I was pleasantly surprised that in less than 3 weeks I have been confirmed and registered officially as a PhD student.

Masters to PhD Conversion

I returned to work on the 18th of February (I went on leave for the first half of Feb) and my return, I have been working furiously towards my official conversion from Masters by Research to PhD. At The University of Melbourne, the process usually takes place between 12-16 months after the commencement of a Masters by Research. I officially started with the university on 1st March 2006 so I thought I'd like to have it done by 1st March 2007. Also because for extra funding to my next conference/workshop, I have to be a confirmed PhD student before I can apply. So anyway, today is 1st March 2007 and I have been given the okay to continue as a PhD student. The forms are in works and it is now just a waiting game.

So how does the process work? Well, there needs to be a department seminar that is advertised as a conversion talk. Then there is a meeting with your committee members. For my conversion, I had the meeting right after the seminar. I know friends who have or are converting right now say they've had their meeting already but they haven't given a seminar or they've given their conversion seminar but they haven't had their meeting yet. But I just did everything all in one go so it was all fresh in everyone's mind. I think that's the best way to go about it. Either way, you have to have written and given your conversion report to your committee before the meeting. This was what has kept me busy for the past week or so. I originally wrote 5-6 pages for my conversion report but James, my new supervising member suggested it would be better if I put more effort into it. So I changed it to 65 pages. Yeah, a bit of a jump, but as long as you talk about the work that you've accomplished in the past 12 months and what your plans for the next 2-2.5 years are, it's all good. You also need a project time line. I drew up a gantt chart for what I hope to accomplish in the next 2 years and then discussed it. I also talked about when I want to accomplish what and future work in my current algorithms and what I can do about generating test data and such. So that was the report. I sent it to Rao, James and Tim (my committee).

After my report, I prepared my slides. I didn't have enough slides and I regret not making some more. I finished in about 35 minutes for a 50 minute presentation. However, questions went for about 15 minutes afterwards to that was good. I had lots of interest from the audience so I'm very happy. At first I was a little bit worried about the turnout. I was hoping for about 5-6 people but there was at least 30 there. However, this meant there was a wider range of questions from different research backgrounds as well. Some of the questions were very interesting and raised issues I had not previously thought about. Usually, the person giving the conversion seminar has to take notes on all the questions that is asked.

Straight after my seminar, I went upstairs to a little meeting room with my committee. They asked me more questions when I answered more satisfactorily than my seminar questions. They asked me to leave the room and then about 5 minutes later, they asked me to return and said congratulations. They asked if I have forms for them and I said no. If I was to do the conversion again, that's what I would have done differently: to speed up the form process, I would have filled out my sections before my meeting and during the meeting, if they agreed to let me convert, they could sign off on it right then and there. But anyway, I filled out the forms later that day and appended the committee meeting minutes as well as a list of questions that were asked at my seminar. I left these forms at reception yesterday and now I'm just sitting tight and hoping things go through before 15th April (the Istanbul workshop).

Graduate School Funding

School of graduate studies have a Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship. The give up to $1250. That would cover everything.

The main three criteria for the graduate school scholarships are as follows

• be a confirmed PhD student
  
• be travelling overseas and for at least 10 days
  
• entail at least two distinct purposes that are clearly relevant to the thesis
  

MAT supplies additional funding to students who wish to travel overseas for purposes related but not essential to the completion of a their PhD. Some general eligibility include never being granted a MAT before, being confirmed as a PhD student, having received funding but not sufficient funding from other sources as well and having more than one purpose for travel of at least 10 days. The student needs to get permission to study overseas/leave for the period as well. The scholarship is offered two rounds every year. Applications close 31st March and 31st August every year. The most difficult part of the application is writing your justification, working out your exact expenditure and getting all the relevant parties to sign off on everything. There's the justification for travel, approval from your supervisor, approval from head of department, analysis of travel risk forms and finally the permission to have research leave/overseas study and such. But it's not too tedious of a process if the addition funding can be granted. About 160 scholarships are offered every year so 80 per cut off date. Looking at the website for the last scholarship offers, about 100 people applied so only 20 people were unsuccessful.

Paper Style

When writing a paper for a conference, the style and preferred format of the conference should be investigated. Particularly interesting is how accepted papers have been written, their writing style, layout and amount of theory and such.

In this conference, different sessions are held depending on the submissions (I assume). But usually there are sessions for access control models, management and administration, distributed systems, implementations and some sort of merging with other technologies(for example, trust and identity management). In earlier conferences (pre 2002), there were no sessions and the papers were sometimes shorter. This year, papers are allowed to be up to 10 pages long, including everything. Majority of papers have 15 or less references. Last year's papers were all pushing the 9-10 page mark.

There aren't too many role engineering papers. I have found some RBAC papers outside of this conference but the majority of them are still here. This will probably be the same for role engineering papers. There was actually a session for role engineering in 2002 and 2003; it had 2 papers in each of the sessions.

The general layout is pretty standard: intro, background, methodology, testing, results and discussion, conclusion and future work. The discussions and methodologies are long while abstract, related work and conclusions are fairly short. The introductions do get very long though. I will have to make my background and introduction shorter for this paper I think. I think it is also okay if I shorten my conclusion as well, after reading some of the other papers. Most of the papers have quite short conclusions. I will be using the using sig-alternative style sheet. I think I picked it because it gives me just a little bit extra in the margins just in case I write too much.

Another thing that I've noticed in papers in this conference, they don't explain what RBAC is. I guess it's just expected everyone reading papers from this conference should know. It's a specialised access control conference. That's a good thing, because it means I don't have to explicitly explain the concepts of permissions, roles, assignments, users, hierarchy and where everything fits. It's more straight to the point which allows for the papers to be shorter.

PhD with a University and Industry

I commenced my PhD through The University of Melbourne in March this year. In July this year, my industry agreements came through and I am officially the first PhD student to be sponsored by CA Labs. The reason it took so long was because I was the first and there were lots of legal issues, like IP to sort through. The general agreement is that the work I do is still owned by the university, but CA have non-restricted rights to everything I do as well.

My current research aims to incorporate data mining for role based access control (RBAC). My supervisor is strong in his data mining knowledge and an expert in this field. Industry have some practical problems they hope to solve with data mining in the area of role extraction for RBAC. I have spent my first 4 months reading about general RBAC issues and have discovered the name of what I am trying to do is called Role Engineering.

My previous research was related to coordinated scan detection algorithms. I completed my honours last year in this area. I evaluated some existing scan detection algorithms and extended one anomaly detection algorithm to consider coordinated scans. The move to data mining for RBAC isn't a great jump. Previous I was working with data mining for network security, now I'm looking at data mining for enterprise security.