Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s history

Professor Athman Bouguettaya Head of the School of Information Technologies 

The computer science specialist and leading researcher in service computing has a long term vision – make the University of Sydney the best in Australia in IT research; and produce graduates who will unleash a wave of unprecedented innovations in industry.

“Nationally we have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of students wanting to pursue careers in information technology. Student numbers have increased by 30 percent over the past decade.

“Together with industry partners, we will work together to identify current and future needs of the digital revolution which has been taking the world by storm,” Professor Bouguettaya says.

“As the pace of IT innovations accelerates, we will train and prepare students for jobs that haven’t even been created yet.  Witness the rise of 3D printing, quantum computing, disposable computing, among others, which will require unique skills that will be essential in the next few years and beyond that,” says Professor Bouguettaya.

To do this Professor Bouguettaya plans to build on the research strengths of the School to significantly increase outreach and partnerships with industry. 

“Over the past decade we’ve heard a lot about big data and it’s here to stay and in a big way. It’s coming from all kinds of sources, sensors, deep space exploration, social media, smartphones, genomics for example. We need to understand how to make this data useful,” says the Professor.

“We also need to continue to sustainably develop the Cloud or data centres, that have been instrumental in supporting the storage and processing of the ever increasing amount of data. 

“Making this data useful is the next challenge and service computing is the next major evolution of computing that aims at transforming massive data into products that bridge the gap between business services and IT services.

“What is commonly referred to as the Internet of things (IoT) is also here to stay.  One key challenge is how to make it secure and useful to society. We have yet to understand and make sense of what it means to have everything that we see and don’t see connected to the internet.  This is the next wave of research innovation which will chart a new and exciting journey in IT research.”