Computer Science and Software Engineering

Postgraduate Research Web Page Administration

Goals:

1. Provide external (international) access to web pages with information about postgraduate students' (and potentially Honours students') research work.
2. Control (and minimize, if possible) the costs to CSSE in terms of administration effort (e.g. accounting, content monitoring, etc.).

Issues:

1. These postgraduate "research web pages" should be clearly differentiated from a student's "personal web pages", which are currently accessible only via CSSE authentication, for these reasons:
• they should contain only research material, possibly associated with one or more research groups, which is accessible from the Internet ;
• the publishable lifetime of such material is likely to be considerably longer than that of a postgraduate student account;
• their content should be readily monitored, with due regard to University policies about published material (e.g. it should be appropriate as semi-official university pages).
2. Accountability and maintenance of the research web pages should rest primarily with each student, with oversight from their research supervisor and occasional monitoring by CSSE systems managers. This implies that each student is responsible for their research web pages, located at an Internet-accessible point on the CSSE web site. After a student leaves the university, their supervisor would take responsibility for the web page. Students should be told: "As with any publication, you would normally want to run it past your supervisor before making it public. You should be aware that this page is your professional face, and should be written with a view to being read by people such as your potential employers, future collaborators, and thesis examiners."
3. The location (and naming) of the parent directories for each student's "research web pages" should be standardised, so that hyperlinks to them can be easily maintained from other locations on the CSSE web site -- in particular, from the postgraduate student's "People" page and from any associated research groups' pages.
4. Students should be encouraged to use these pages. Initially the department could set up a default page (based on the information on our photo board in reception), and then encourage students to update it regularly.
5. Students should note that our internationally available web pages do not have scripts or executables switched on, and that security can be an issue with these pages.

Current Implementation:

The current implementation of postgrad research pages is available here.