Fred Brown

Dr Fred Brown

Adjunct Senior Lecturer

School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology


I am an adjunct Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at The University of Adelaide. I am also a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Scientist and a member of the ACM. I received a PhD from St Andrews University in Scotland, for my work in Persistent Object Systems. My research interests have included programming language design, type systems, data intensive applications, business information systems and bioinformatics.

My research interests have an essentially computer systems focus, that is, I like building useful tools for others to use by applying over 30 years of computer systems experience to interesting problems. Over time, this has included designing and implementing complete programming systems, virtual machines, compilers, garbage collection algorithms and stable storage systems.

An example, in the area of bioinformatics, is the interesting challenge of large scale suffix tree construction algorithms. A suffix tree is just a compressed trie of all suffixes (substrings ending at the end of a string) in a string. If you can build one, you can implement solutions to lots of interesting string problems very efficiently. Large scale suffix tree construction is a particularly interesting problem from a systems point of view, as the linear time algorithm exhibits what is effectively random memory access. Random memory access is really bad when things either don't fit into your CPU caches, or worse still don't fit into main memory either.

  • Appointments

    Date Position Institution name
    2011 - 2014 Business Analyst The University of Adelaide
    2000 - 2005 Associate Dean (Information Technology) The University of Adelaide
    1992 - 2018 Senior Lecturer The University of Adelaide
    1991 - 1992 Lecturer The University of St Andrews
    1991 - 1991 SERC Post Doctoral Research Fellow The University of St Andrews
    1990 - 1991 Lecturer The University of St Andrews
    1988 - 1990 Post Doctoral Fellow The University of St Andrews
    1986 - 1988 Research Assistant - Persistent Information Space Architectures The University of St Andrews
    1984 - 1991 Warning Officer United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation
    1983 - 1986 Research Assistant - Computer Graphics Tools The University of St Andrews
    1978 - 1984 Observer Royal Observer Corps
  • Education

    Date Institution name Country Title
    1983 - 1988 The University of St Andrews Scotland PhD
    1979 - 1983 The University of St Andrews Scotland BSc(Hons) 1st Class, Computational Science
  • Object Oriented Programming - Indigenous Course Enrichment Project - SGDE, $2,000, The University of Adelaide, 2016.
  • (with Alexander B.)An Integrated Web Based Assignment Submission, Assessment and Feedback System A$40,000, 2008 University Implementation Grants for Learning and Teaching Enhancement, The University of Adelaide, 2008.
  • Travel Scholarship c.A$5,000, Apple University Consortium, Apple World Wide Developers Conference Scholarships Program, 2008.
  • (with Alexander B., Falkner K., Michalewicz Z. & el-Gindy H.) A Problem Solving Curriculum in Computing us$40,000, Google Research Award Scheme, 2007.
  • Real-time PCR Analysis Tools A$10,000, Adelaide Research and Innovation Pty Ltd, 2007.
  • Real-time PCR Analysis Tools A$20,000, The University of Adelaide, 2006.
  • Travel Scholarship A$6,300, Apple University Consortium, Apple World Wide Developers Conference Scholarships Program, 2004.
  • Constructing Suffix Trees Larger than Memory A$9,983, Apple University Consortium, AUDF Development Grant Program, 2003.
  • Incremental Garbage Collection for Massive Object Stores A$7,000, University of Adelaide Small Grants Scheme, 2002.
  • Partition Selection Policies for Garbage Collection of an OODBMS A$147,000, Sun Microsystems Academic Equipment Grants Scheme, 2001.
  • Real-world Software Engineering using Virtual Reality A$47,000, Sun Microsystems Academic Equipment Grants Scheme, 2001.
  • Simulation of Massive Object Stores A$6,500, University of Adelaide Small Grants Scheme, 2001.
  • Travel Scholarship A$4,000 Apple University Consortium, Apple World Wide Developers Conference Scholarships Program, 2001.

Over the last 30 years the teaching environment and expectations have changed dramatically. Computers are now ubiquitous, extremely capable and universal access to broadband internet  is almost a reality. This has lead to significant changes in what we teach, how we teach it and what resources we can expect students to provide for themselves.

As the teaching environment has evolved I have spent a significant amount of time working on useful systems that leverage the innovations to support our teaching and student administration. For example, most assignment work in Computer Science now uses a web based submission system that I wrote, it can automatically assess and mark student work providing instant feedback. To ease the pain of timetabling and resolving the inevitable enrolment issues, I implemented an in browser timetable viewing system that allows solutions to complex scheduling issues to be identified in a just a few clicks.

The combination of my computer systems focussed research interests and the practical experience of building useful systems that have real users and must be maintained, provides a solid foundation to my teaching of computer systems, programming and software engineering.

Recent teaching

Year Semester 1 Semester 2
2022 ● COMP SCI 7081MELB Computer Systems (summer)  
2021 ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 7081MELA Computer Systems (tri 3)
2020 ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
2019 ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
2018 ● COMP SCI 3303 Engineering Software as Services I
● COMP SCI 4023 / 4123 / 7023 Software Process Improvement
● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3304 Engineering Software as Services II
2017 ● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3303 Engineering Software as Services I
● COMP SCI 4023 / 4123 / 7023 Software Process Improvement
● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3304 Engineering Software as Services II
 
2016 ● COMP SCI 1102 / 1102BR Object Oriented Programming
● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3303 Engineering Software as Services I
● COMP SCI 4023 / 4123 / 7023 Software Process Improvement
● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3304 Engineering Software as Services II
 
 
2015 ● COMP SCI 1102 / 1102BR Object Oriented Programming
● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3303 Engineering Software as Services I
● COMP SCI 4023 / 7023 Software Process Improvement
● COMP SCI 1102 / 1102BR Object Oriented Programming
● COMP SCI 2000 / 7081 Computer Systems
● COMP SCI 3304 Engineering Software as Services II
 
2014 ● COMP SCI 2202 / 7202 Foundations of Computer Science
● COMP SCI 4023 / 7023 Software Process Improvement
 
 
● COMP SCI 1102 / 1102BR / 1202 / 1202BR Object Oriented Programming
● COMP SCI 3018 Software Engineering Group Project 1B
● COMP SCI 4003B Software Engineering Group Project 2 Part B
● COMP SCI 4011B Software Engineering Honours Project 1B
2013   ● COMP SCI 4023 / 7023 Software Process Improvement
● COMP SCI 4054 / 7054 High Integrity Software Engineering
  • Past Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)

    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2011 - 2018 Co-Supervisor Personalized Medicine Support System for Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia Patients Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mrs Haneen Reda M Banjar
    2006 - 2007 Principal Supervisor Using Sequence Similarity to Predict the Function of Biological Sequences Master of Science in Mathematical and Computer Sciences Master Full Time Mr Craig Jones
    1997 - 2012 Principal Supervisor An Active Distributed Storage Architecture Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Dr Craig Patten

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