Andrew Lampert

Research/Software Engineer

CSIRO

Graduated 2001

In 2000, I completed a maths degree and a software engineering degree with honours from the University of Melbourne. Before joining the CSIRO in early 2002, I worked as an analyst at Telstra in their Online Projects area, and was involved in several large software projects involving customer authentication and authorisation, and enterprise application integration.

Since joining CSIRO, I have worked on a diverse range of projects, including a multi-agent text categorisation system and a natural language generation (NLG) engine. For much of the past year, I have been working for Boeing to apply our NLG engine within an Airborne Early Warning and Control environment as part of a complex, adaptive user interface. Our project team was recently awarded the CSIRO divisional award for Business Excellence for our work in gaining the contracts from Boeing.

I spend much of my time as a research/software engineer researching and implementing ways to improve human computer interaction. I work primarily with Natural Language Generation software and task based interfaces (which customise the presentation of information and the methods of interaction to suit the context of a user’s current task). This means I spend my time reading articles, and attending seminars and conferences, in between designing and writing code to implement our research ideas in software.

I rely on my mathematical skills to perform much of my analytical work. From examining emergent behaviour in complex systems, to statistical processing of natural language, maths and statistics have been an integral part of my job at CSIRO. As I continue further study in the field of Natural Language Processing, I have no doubt that I will continue to rely on and benefit from my background in mathematics and statistics.