Winner, Distinguished Service Award
Alan Fekete’s breadth of contribution and success in academia is enormous. Notably, he was named a Distinguished Scientist by the ACM “in recognition of significant accomplishments in, and impact on, the computing field.” His leadership in the development of the field of IT in Australia is outstanding. I list two significant contributions here. Alan has helped to build and strengthen the Australasian IT community through his role in leading national conferences across multiple subdisciplines, even some outside his own research domain. In 2018-19 Alan led the extensive consultation across the community to propose changes to the Field of Research (FoR) codes. Alan’s public contributions to the IT community include being on the CORE exec, chairing the CORE Dissertation award committee, and supporting and contributing to journal and conference rankings.
Presentation Title: Multi-objective Optimization for an Academic Career: Swings and Roundabouts?
Abstract: Alan Fekete has been a computer science academic at University of Sydney since 1988. He has been active in research, teaching, institutional service, and discipline service. This talk reflects on some choices and tradeoffs he has seen in keeping all these activities going, and in responding to not-perfectly-aligned values from different communities. The goal of the talk is to be a useful stimulus for early and mid-career staff as they navigate the academic role.