Career Summary
I am an eternal UTas student. During Honours (1998) I did as much tutorial work as I could, including seemingly endless marking, and this led to a PhD with an intent to lecture (1999).
A few years later (2001), the PhD wasn't finished, but I had started casual lecturing. The timing was good, and next year I became a probational staff member.
Ah, but, I still had to finish that PhD, and many late nights, supervisors, teaching interruptions, time-management craziness, and annoying frustrations later, I did. A quick couple of publications, and... *pooff*... a tenured position appeared (2006).
Research Interests
My current research interests are:
- refinement of my recently completely PhD work into extensible programming languages.
- an eternal quest to produce the "ultimate" Mandelbrot set renderer
(I wrote my first Mandelbrot set renderer in highschool, have written versions for, at least, an Archimedes, Amiga 500, Amiga 4000, and a handcoded unlimited precision fixed-point math version for x86).
- improved mobile device text entry (my mobile phone frustrates me).
Non-research activities:
Every couple of years I whip up another little minor DirectX game. This originally started a bit before when I started Honours (when I was also going a bit nuts with Quake 1 modding, but that's another story), and has been a continuing trend when I can find the time (or have something worth seriously procrastinating over).
In the beginning, my big idea was to have a bunch of tiny multi-player mini-games that were all incredibly playable in their own right (these were/are my favourite games) and bundle them all together as just the most fun you can every have. Unfortunately, a year or two after I had this idea, Nin-#!$%-tendo released Mario Party, and I released that I was too late. (ok, this is my failed idea, what's yours :P)
Fuzzies: Circa 1997 (Circa DirectX3). A port of "Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine" which was a Megadrive game that I only rented, and could never find anywhere... hence, has to write it myself (mine's better anyway - three player combat, not just two :P). This actually involved a flexible engine that could also do Tetris and Columns clones, but I never really finished them.
Arena Cars: Circa 1997. A port of some Amiga game I can't remember the name of that is kinda like a destruction derby inside a shrinking sumo ring :) Also three player combat - I was pretty limited by the number of player's that could crowd a keyboard - I never took the time to network it (or any other game I wrote) :S
Cathedral: Circa 1998. Never got past the prototype.
Thrust: Circa 2005. A port of my absolute favourite BBC Micro game. Made this a pretty-much pixel exact port - deliberately DIDN'T update the graphics - aaaah nostalgia (oh, and I do have a working BBC Micro). Fly around a little spaceship and eventually grab a sphere thingi, and have to contend with its extra inertia - crazy hard, but incredibly fun. Only single player though.
Space Wars: Circa ???. Two spaceships, lots of planets with active gravity, shoot each other. Duh.
Research Areas:Teaching
I teach a variety of subjects in all under-graduate years. These range from basic computer hardware and introductory computing topics, to Java programming, to algorithm design, to mobile computing.
UnitsSelected Publications:- Lewis, IJ, 2006, 'A New General Parser for Extensible Languages', Proceedings of the 17th IASTED International Conference in Modelling and Simulation, Montreal, Canada, pgs. 394-400 [F1]
- Lewis, IJ, 2006, 'An Embedded Haskell Subset Implementation', Proceedings of the of the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering Research & Practice, Las Vegas, Nevada, pgs. 858-865 [F1]
Current and Supervised Project/s:
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