ANCACC Medal

ANCCAC Award Presentation

To Dr. Catherine Middleton

By Tom Worthington FACS HML, Director of Publications, The Australian Computer Society

Monday 16 June 2003, 5.30pm, Brisbane

Speaker's Notes (Draft 14 June 2003)

History of ANCCAC

The Australian Committee on Computation and Automatic Control (ANCCAC) was formed in 1958. It ran a series of succesful computing conferences and represented Australia internationally. The Australian Computer Society, founded on 1 January 1966, and in 1969 ANCCAC was disolved with its functions taken on by ACS.

The ANCCAC award was established in 19?? to encourage ????.

Australian Committee on Computation and Automatic Control (ANCCAC)

1958 Groups involved in early applications of computing worked together to establish the Australian National Committee on Computation and Automatic Control (ANCCAC) to advance the design, development and application of computing through conferences and knowledge exchange.

1960 The first ANCCAC Conference, held in Sydney, attracted650 delegates. Subsequent conferences attracted over 900registrations as interest in these events grew.

1961 ANCCAC was accepted as the 16th full member of the International Federation for Information Processing(IFIP), the global society representing computingprofessionals.

1966 The Australian Computer Society was founded on 1 January by the five existing state branches: SA, VIC, QLD,NSW and Canberra.

1969 The ACS replaced ANCCAC as the Australian representative body within IFIP. ANCCAC was dissolved, handing over all its assets to the ACS.

From: TimeLine25-10-01.qxd (Page 1) http://www.acs.org.au/boards/marketing/ACSfinal.pdf

Some Past recipients

Sale, A. (2001). Broadband Internet Access in Regional Australia. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology 33(4): 346-355. URL: http://www.ballarat.edu.au/jrpit/abstracts/33_346.pdf

Swatman P.A., Swatman P.M.C. and Everett J.E. (1990) "Stages of Growth of an Innovative Software House: an Additional Criterion for Software Package Selection", Australian Computer Journal, Vol. 22, No. 7, August, 88-98.

How the recipient is selected

The conditions for the award of this prize are as follows:

  1. The medal, to be known as the 'ANCCAC Medal' and a cash prize (of $1,500 in 1993 and in 2001) shall be available for award each year.
  2. Competition for this prize shall be open to all authors whose papers have been published in the Australian Computer Journal or in any of the Society's other National or Branch publications, excluding published conference proceedings during the year concerned.
  3. If in any year no paper is considered to be of sufficient merit, the Council may suspend the award in that year.
  4. Papers by joint authors are eligible for consideration. If the prize is awarded for a paper by joint authors, a medal will be awarded to each and the total value of the cash prize will be divided equally among the authors.
  5. The Council will make its decision concerning the award of a prize for the previous year at its first meeting in any year. This decision will be made after considering the recommendations of the Prizes and Awards Committee appointed by the Council.

Judging Criteria

Competition for this prize shall be open to all authors whose papers have been published in the Australian Computer Journal or in any of the Society's other National or Branch publications, excluding published conference proceedings during the year concerned.

The Committee shall make its recommendations after taking into account:

(a) the value of the work to the profession (40%),
(b) its originality and novelty (40%),
(c) qualities such as accuracy, precision of explanation, development of arguments and demonstration of the critical approach (10%), and
(d) the general arrangement, including such points as the use of a summary, an introduction, figures, and a statement of conclusion (10%)

Recipient for 2003

Recipient

Catherine Middleton earned her Ph.D. from the Schulich School of Business at York University, in Toronto, Canada. This paper draws from her dissertation research, which investigated residential usage of broadband technologies (including high speed internet access and multimedia services). Dr. Middleton is a faculty member at Ryerson University’s School of Information Technology Management, where she teaches courses in eBusiness, strategic uses of IT, and diffusion of communications innovations, and continues her research in the area of consumer usage of broadband technologies.

The Paper

This paper describes the deployment of a residential broadband network by relating two parallel but contrasting stories. Story 1 considers network providers’ search for a killer application to drive demand for broadband networks, while Story 2 suggests that consumers have already found a killer application in e-mail and basic connectivity. It appears that residential broadband networks are currently being developed with a Story 1 perspective in mind. Story 2 should be assessed in the context of its historical persistence and significance. The implications for future development of residential broadband networks are considered when both stories are accepted as plausible.

C. A. Middleton (2002). Who needs a `Killer App`? Two Perspectives on Content in Residential Broadband Networks. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology 34(2): 67-81. URL: http://www.ballarat.edu.au/jrpit/Volume34.2_Middletonarticle.pdf

See Also