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Welcome to davidjohnpaul.com
I am a computer scientist, originally from Newcastle, but now living in Armidale, where I work at the University of New England as an Associate Professor in Computational Science.
This site is a location for me to collect and publish information about various projects I work on, or information that is useful for me to disseminate or recall later. A lot of this data is not publicly accessible, but you may find something useful.
If you wish to get in touch, please contact me via email at contact@davidjohnpaul.com.
Academic Biography
Dr David Paul is a computer scientist interested in the Internet and distributed systems, privacy and security, and applied computer science. He completed his studies at the University of Newcastle, where he obtained Bachelors degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2004, before completing Honours in Computer Science in 2005 and a PhD titled "Deliberate Cooperation in Service-Oriented Environments: Dynamic Transactional Workflows for Web Services" in 2012. From 2005-2015, Dr Paul was employed by the Schizophrenia Research Institute, developing an interest in eHealth, while also teaching casually at the University of Newcastle. In 2014, he also started some work with the Health Behaviour Research Group, developing Web applications to conduct and assist with research. In 2015 he accepted a position as a Lecturer in Computational Science at the University of New England in the School of Science and Technology, contributing to a complete redesign of all Computer Science curricula for which the entire Computational Science team was awarded a School of Science and Technology Teaching Award in 2017, and Dr Paul was awarded a School of Science and Technology Development Award for the development of the introductory programming unit COSC110. Since starting at the University of New England, Dr Paul's research interests have broadened into areas such as agriculture and sports science. He has been successful in a number of research grants and supervision of research students.
Dr Paul is especially interested in using technology in multidisciplinary settings where they can be of practical use. Dr Paul has extensive experience combining multiple disparate datasets to allow more powerful analysis and modelling than would be possible with any single dataset on its own, while still ensuring privacy even for very sensitive data.
While working for the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank, Dr Paul helped design and develop a system that combines clinical neurophysiological, genetic, and brain image data to create the largest brain research project ever undertaken in Australia. This has resulted in an improved understanding of one of the most perplexing mental disorders around, and the system continues to support further research.
As part of his work with the Health Behaviour Research Group, Dr Paul was co-developer of QuON, a system to allow researchers to electronically conduct surveys and aggregate the collected data which has been used by multiple institutions around Australia. The closed-source version of this system adds features that can be difficult to achieve in other online survey systems, such as supporting stratified randomised values, complex branching, automatic creation and dissemination of customised documents, and the automated sharing of metadata with ANDS systems.
The skills and experience from his work in mental health were also useful when helping the SheepCRC create the ASKBILL system, which notifies farmers of unusual risks to their sheep. This system combines livestock and pasture information with historic and forecast weather conditions to predict when sheep are at risk from heat or chill events, flystrike, or worm burden. This allows a farmer to more efficiently manage their farm, while also improving the welfare of the animals. Another system, RamSelect allows farmers to improve the genetic profile of their flock by entering desired criteria (e.g. a wool farmer might be interested in finer thread diameter, while a meat farmer would be more interested in animals' growth rates) and ranking rams currently for sale that would best meet the farmer's requirements, without needing to understand the complexities of the genetics involved.
While still interested in the areas of mental health and agriculture (for example, Dr Paul has been involved in the development of an Android app to help treat metabolic syndrome, and continues to work in projects related to agriculture), he is also interested in expanding to other application areas. These include more traditional computer science areas such as optimisation and software defined networking, and external areas such as finance and sports science.