Helen Ashman

Web Technologies Research Group,
School of Computer Science and Information Technology,
University of Nottingham
Jubilee Campus, Nottingham NG8 1BB, U.K.
email hla AT 🙂 cs.nott.ac.uk
phone +44 115 951 4237
fax +44 115 951 4254

NEWS!

Hypertext 2004 conference to be held in Santa Cruz, California, August 9-13, 2004,
with yours truly as joint programme chair, looking forward to your paper.

Short history

I am an expatriate Australian, having come to the UK in 1997 to join the University of Nottingham as a lecturer. With a few sleepless nights, I managed to complete my doctoral dissertation Theory and Practice of Large-Scale Hypermedia Management Systems and handed it up the day before flying out to Britain (the packing was not so well organised…). I studied the Ph.D. at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT), in the Multimedia Database Systems Group. My supervisors were Professor Ron Sacks-Davis and Prof Ross Wilkinson. I did this study while employed at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Australia.

I enjoy living in the UK but do miss some aspects of Australia, especially the wine! However, you can buy excellent Australian wine from quite a number of sources so there’s not much I really have to do without.

The Web Technologies Research Group

The new Web Technologies Research Group officially came into being on 1 Jan 2001 (which was also the centenary of Federation in Australia). I head the group which has two main areas of interest:

The first area of interest is the hypermedia and online learning team, with the Extending XML’s linking project, led by me and Prof David Brailsford, with Ph.D. students Mark Truran and Duncan Martin, the Minerva ADAPT project, led by me and Tim Brailsford, and the WHURLE project, led by Tim Brailsford, with Adam Moore, and Craig Stewart, with Ph.D. students Mohamed Ramzy Zakariah, Liz Brown and Maha Al-Yahya, and the ZigZag work led by me and Tim, with guidance, clarity and motivation from our Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Ted Nelson, with Adam Moore the chief researcher and Jim Goulding a Ph.D. student. Associate members of the group include Peter Davies, Will Trewhella and Simon Barnes.
The other area of interest is cryptography, security, and data privacy. I have two cryptography projects, one jointly with BT Labs with Ph.D. student Ben Moss and the other with Amino Communications with Ph.D. student Henry Coupe. A third Ph.D. student, Arnie Bates, works on the data privacy project.

Extracurricular activities

I am a member of the new ACM SIGWEB executive committee, nominally Information Director but we are all doing a bit of everything.

I was joint General Chair of ACM Hypertext ’03 conference, held here in Nottingham. Hard work, but we really enjoyed it!

In 2002, I edited a special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia on Hypermedia and the Web.

Recently I was guest editor of an ACM Computing SurveysSymposium on Hypertext and Hypermedia with Rosemary Simpson of Brown University. The papers are now on-line on the ACM site.

I am a member of the IFIP Working Group 6.4 (Internet Applications Engineering).

I am now the Hypermedia Systems Theme editor for the Journal of Digital Information.

I am also on the editorial board of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia.

I am also a steering committee member for the Hypertext Functionality workshop series.

Photo Gallery

I am a very proud mother of two sweet little girls, Lee and Cate.

Teaching

WARNING: All course notes on this site are copyright, whether explicitly declared to be so or otherwise.

G53IDS/G53IDJ: Individual Dissertation (Third Year Project).
G53CAS: Cryptography and Security
G5CSEC: Network Security

These notes will not be available outside the University for copyright reasons.

I previously taught the following but the notes are now of purely historical value only:

G5AHOC: History of Computers and Computing
G5BIAW: The Internet and the World Wide Web

Publications

Listed here are a few publications, but see this page for the full list, or see the group’s publications page for a list of the group’s papers.

Journal papers
H. Ashman, Electronic Document Addressing – Dealing With Change. ACM Computing Surveys, 32, 3, September 2000.
H. Ashman, Relations modelling sets of hypermedia links and navigation. Computer Journal, OUP, 43, 5, 2000.
Editorials

H. Ashman and R. Simpson (eds), Electronic symposium issue of ACM Computing Surveys on Hypertext and Hypermedia ACM, December 1999, 31, 4es.
Additionally, the ACM Hypertext Research and Resource Testbed contains a full set of HTML versions of the papers, as well as the citationbase and global index.
H. Ashman, M. Bieber, V. Balasubramanian and H. Oinas-Kukkonen (eds), Special issue of the Journal of Digital Information, on Hypertext Functionality, 4, 1, February 1999.
H. Ashman and P. Thistlewaite (eds), Proceedings of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference, Elsevier, April 1998. this also appeared as IEEE Computer Systems and ISDN, Volume 31 nos 1-7 (1998).
Conference papers

D. Martin and H.L. Ashman, GOATE: XLink and Beyond, Proceedings of Hypertext 2002, ACM, June 2002, pp 142-3.
H.L. Ashman and M. Gilbert, And now for something completely different: looking ahead to new encryption and secrecy protocols, proceedings of The Communications Design Conference, San Jose, October 2001.
P.J. Nürnberg and H. Ashman, What was the question? Reconciling World Wide Web and traditional hypertext research, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext ’99, February 1999, pp 83-90.

Last update 19th November 2003, Helen Ashman.

Helen Ashman

Web Technologies Research Group, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus, Nottingham NG8 1BB, U.K. email hla AT 🙂 cs.nott.ac.uk phone +44 115 951 4237 fax +44 115 951 4254