Dr William Billingsley
Professor in Computational Science - Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law; School of Science and Technology
Phone: +61 2 6773 2513
Email: wbilling@une.edu.au
Building: C26, Mathematics, Statistics & Computer Science Building, Room 205
Biography
William is an associate professor in computer science at UNE. He came to academia from a background as a software engineer, before undertaking a PhD in the human computer interaction research group at the University of Cambridge in the early 2000s – working on the “Intelligent Book project” – smart and social education technology that enabled students to work cooperatively with machine reasoning systems.
This gave William an ongoing interest in “smart useful systems” – how we design and build systems that let people explore topics and work with models, analytics, and artificial intelligence that might think very differently about the topic. It also sparked ongoing interests in both technology education and education technology.
From 2009 to 2014, William was a senior research engineer with NICTA’s Queensland Research Laboratory. Projects William worked on included a conversation analytics dashboard for use in medical communication skills assessments, a system for collaborative interaction in large university classes, and a system for improving group awareness in collaborative teams. William also taught software engineering topics for the University of Queensland, with a particular interest in bringing continuous integration and other modern development practices into software studio classes.
William joined UNE in 2015, with a particular interest in growing and advancing UNE’s undergraduate computer science teaching. He has served in a number of leadership and service roles within the group: course coordinator for undergraduate programmes, convener (teaching and learning) for the discipline through the pandemic, and as chair of the School Education Committee.
William maintains a strong interest in developing smart useful systems. He was involved in a research grant to help the Sheep CRC to establish an agile apps team, which would go on to develop ASKBILL (an intelligent analytics system for livestock management). In personal projects, he has created a system for self-publishing courses full of programmable games and interactive models, and took “supercollaborative” studio pedagogies for software engineering online.
His teaching interests include functional and reactive programming (Scala), human-computer interaction, computational thinking, and software engineering. He has also taught modern web programming and developed explorable explanations and interactive materials for digital electronics.
