Dr William Billingsley
Associate Professor in Computational Science , Computer Science - School of Science and Technology
Biography
I came to academia from a background as a software engineer – prior to my PhD I was working in industry. In the early 2000s I moved to Cambridge for my PhD, where I worked on "the Intelligent Book" – smart and social education technology that enabled students to work cooperatively with machine reasoning systems. This gave me an ongoing interest in the HCI and software engineering aspects of AI – how people and systems that have very different ways of thinking about a problem can collaborate. (As well as interests in both technology education and education technology.)
From 2009 to 2014 I was a senior research engineer with NICTA. Initially I was building systems that could integrate many different kinds of automated analysis of a videorecorded conversation, for use in medical communication skills training. I also taught software engineering for the University of Queensland, where I co-developed a "supercollaborative" studio course. This put large numbers of students onto a common codebase, using continuous integration and other modern development practices, to learn the inherently collaborative nature of software development.
I joined UNE in 2015, becoming the coordinator of the BCompSc through its redesign.
Qualifications
PhD (Computer Science) University of Cambridge
Awards
Teaching Areas
Computer science, software engineering, programming, human-computer interaction
Primary Research Area/s
Technology education; Education technology; Human-Computer Interaction; Software EngineeringResearch Interests
"Smart useful systems". Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, and Education Technology
Research Supervision Experience
Publications
Billingsley, W. The Case of the Fragmented Classroom. International Conference on Software Engineering, Montreal, Canada, 2019.
Billingsley, W., Torbay, R., Fletcher, P.R., Thomas, R.N., Steel, J.R.H., and Süß, J.G. Taking a Studio Course in Distributed Software Engineering from a Large Local Cohort to a Small Global Cohort. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) 19 (2), 13, 2019
McKenzie, M., Loxley, P., Billingsley, W. , and Wong, S. Competitive Reinforcement Learning in Atari Games. In: Peng W., Alahakoon D., Li X. (eds) AI 2017: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10400, 2017
Billingsley, W., Ngu, B., Phan, H., Gromik, N., & Kwan, P. Using a Video-Based Critique Process to Support Studio Pedagogies in Distance Education – A Tool and Pilot Study. 33rd International Conference of Innovation, Practice and Research in the Use of Educational Technologies in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE), 2016
Billingsley, W. and Steel, J.R.H. Towards a supercollaborative software engineering MOOC. In: Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE Companion 2014). ACM, pp 283-286. (DOI:10.1145/2591062.2591157) 2014
Billingsley, W. and Steel, J.R.H. A comparison of two iterations of a software studio course based on continuous integration. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '13). ACM, pp 213-218, (DOI:10.1145/2462476.2465592), 2013
Süß, J.G. and Billingsley, W. Using continuous integration of code and content to teach software engineering with limited resources. In PrProceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '12). IEEE Press, pp 1175-1184, 2012Billingsley, W., Gallois, C., Smith, A. and Watson, M. COMLEX: visualizing communication for research and saving lives. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). ACM, pp 3757-3762, (DOI:10.1145/1753846.1754051), 2010
Billingsley, W. and Robinson, P., Student Proof Exercises Using MathsTiles and Isabelle/HOL in an Intelligent Book. Journal of Automated Reasoning, Vol 39:2, pp 181-218, 2007
Clinical Skills and Experience
Memberships
ACM, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGCSE
Consultancy Interests
Technology design, software development