Dr William Billingsley

Associate Professor in Computational Science , Computer Science - School of Science and Technology

William Billingsley

Phone: +61 2 6773 2513

Email: wbilling@une.edu.au

Twitter: @wbillingsley

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 Engineering

Research 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

Community and Advocacy Organisation Collaborations

Further Information