Researcher
Queensland Research Laboratory, Brisbane

About

Dr Ricky Robinson is a researcher at NICTA's Queensland Research Laboratory (QRL), where he investigates approaches to the management of information in context-aware computing environments, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. Dr Robinson is the creator of Citemine, a web-based exchange for research publications.

NICTA Projects

Dr Robinson first joined NICTA QRL in 2006 as a member of the SAFE Networks project, which investigated new routing protocols for wireless mesh networks, and conducted research into computing platforms that enable software applications to adapt their behaviour to cater to the current situation of the user.

Citemine employs mechanism design to expose the flows of reputation that exist within academic publishing and peer review, and institutes accountability for ones reviews. A by-product of its design is a leading (predictive) metric that can be used by funding agencies and employers to assess researchers and the manuscripts they write. This metric is a direct reflection of how one's peers value one's research contribution at the present time.

From mid-2007 to the end of 2008, he led the formulation of NICTA's Safety & Security business strategy. A full-time position has since been created for this role.

Previous Positions

Before joining NICTA, Dr Robinson worked as a software engineer for a company that develops applications for monitoring the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM). The particular product he helped to develop enabled large energy users (such as steel smelters) to decide when to curtail their electricity usage. The software helps these companies to save thousands, if not millions, of dollars over the course of a year due to the wildly fluctuating prices on the NEM (the price can vary from about $20/MWh to $10,000/MWh in a matter of minutes).

In 2001, prior to his Ph.D. candidature, he undertook a research internship at Sun Microsystems Research Labs in Mountain View, California. During this internship he helped to develop a prototype of the Multitasking Virtual Machine, a version of Sun's Hotspot Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that is capable of executing multiple isolated tasks within a single instance of the JVM. This design has several benefits including smaller memory footprint and faster execution of code (since tasks subsequent to the first can make use of most of the code that has already been compiled to the native representation by the Hotspot runtime compiler). This research is now subject to the Java Community Process and looks set for inclusion in future versions of Java. Elements of this research have already found their way into the Squawk JVM for very limited capability devices.

Qualifications

Dr Ricky Robinson was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science by the University of Queensland in 2005. He holds a Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons 1) degree from the same institution.

Research Interests

In addition to the main threads of research described above, Dr Robinson is also keenly interested in technologies that support social networks, and the social dynamics and economic "mechanisms" that underlie these networks. The above-mentioned Citemine initiative has provided an outlet for him to explore the problems of incentive and reputation in a specific kind of social (professional) network.

Collaboration

Dr Robinson collaborates extensively with his colleagues at QRL, including the business development manager, and with colleagues in the Making Sense of Data and Networked Systems themes.

Selected Publications

Ricky Robinson, Karen Henricksen and Jadwiga Indulska. XCML: A runtime representation for the Context Modelling Language. Fifth Annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerComW'07 - Context Modelling and Reasoning). 2007, White Plains, NY, USA.

Karen Henricksen and Ricky Robinson. A survey of middleware for sensor networks: state-of-the-art and future directions. MidSens '06: Proceedings of the international workshop on Middleware for sensor networks. 2006, Melbourne, Australia.

Ricky Robinson and Jadwiga Indulska. The Emergence of Order in Random Walk Resource Discovery Protocols. In The Ninth International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (Special Session on Complex Adaptive Systems), pages 827-833. Springer-Verlag, volume LNCS 3683, September 14-16, 2005, Melbourne, Australia.

Ricky Robinson and Jadwiga Indulska. A Context-Sensitive Service Discovery Protocol for Mobile Computing Environments. In The Fourth International Conference on Mobile Business, pages 565-572. IEEE Computer Society, July 11-13, 2005, Sydney, Australia.

Contact Details for Ricky Robinson

Phone:	+61 7 3300 8562
Postal Address:	PO Box 6020 St Lucia QLD 4067 Australia
Physical (Delivery) Address:	Level 5, Axon Building (47), Staff House Road, St Lucia  Qld  4072 Brisbane QLD 4000
E-mail:	ricky.robinson@nicta.com.au