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.

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.

SuperSearch

Previously, electronic portions of the library catalogues at my uni were organised using a system called buddy. They were sorted via subject (Subject Resources). This meant sorting by faculty (Engineering) and then by department (Computer Science and Software Engineering). It took a while to get to the page I wanted (if I didn't book mark it) but once I got there, it had subscribed links to majority of the e-journals I have needed(such as ACM portal, Springerlink and IEEE Xplorer). The list was quite comprehensive and not user unfriendly. However, I have discovered today that this system will slowly be phased out, and in it's place will be a system called SuperSearch. This system will be the only available, with buddy being disabled in February next year. I'm not too sure how this SuperSearch will work exactly but so far, I do not like it. It is advertised to be able to find you journal papers and more but I can't even find my favour digital library: ACM Portal. Things are I know are in the portal are not being returned. This is assuming this SuperSearch is a like a composite service that uses other digital libraries as its underlying information source. At the moment, I doesn't seem like it has those capabilities. I did find a page with links for Engineering. This popup contained 8 links, only one of which I used. :S. I hope the system is still in beta. Either it's not complete or I just don't know how to use it. I have a feeling it's the latter since I'm not spectacular with new technology; it takes a while for me to get use to. But I still hope it's in Beta because it's not the easiest to navigate through. Although I do appreciate not having to type in my student ID barcode everytime I want to look up papers. Username and password for my central Melbourne uni account is much easier to remember.

Letter from the Vice-Chancellor

A letter came in the mail for me last week. It came in a standard white envelope with the Melbourne University logo on the front. On the back however, there was writing indicating that it was from the office of the Vice-Chancellor. My dad was the first to see the envelope. He had an idea of what the letter could be and was dying to see it. He was so eager that he was holding the envelope to the light in hope of gaining a clue on what was inside. It was at the stage where my mum said just open the letter and tell her you did it accidentally because you thought it was addressed to you. Then she said, she did it all the time. Dana doesn't realise. O_O.

It was a congratulatory letter for winning the Anita Borg Scholarship.

On the CSSE homepage

I also seem to have made it onto the CSSE homepage. I am a news item. Not written very well as Nicole has pointed out, but honouring none the less. I am indeed popular this week. I guess this is my 15 seconds of fame.

In the Paper

My name appears in an article in The Age today. How every exciting. Ben was procrastinating at work and read my name and thought, "hey! I know this person". Then he sms'd me and now I know. Apparently someone also called my mum to congratulate her. Good work mum.

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.