Chancellor Brumby, Acting Vice Chancellor Dodds, and distinguished guests.
Chancellor, thank you very much for the great honor you have bestowed on me today through the award of the degree Doctor of Science honoris causa. And to receive this honor in the city of my birth gives this day the greatest of significance for me.
Let me start by saying that, in a very real sense, I owe my academic career to La Trobe University.
I did my Ph.D. at ANU between 1975 and 1979. I was in the last stages of my thesis research and had been working on an algorithm used in a paper in the late 1950s to solve an important problem in an area of logic. This algorithm was well known, one might say “theoretically," to people who worked in this field, and had been used to try to solve further and related open problems in it. However, it had never been explored “practically,” that is, it was not known whether it could be used for anything useful in practice by being implemented on a computer. I was completing my Ph.D. thesis and was only able raise this question in the last few pages of it and make a few simple though suggestive calculations. However, it was such an interesting research problem that I decided that if I could get an academic position post-Ph.D. this was one of the problems on which I wanted to work.
La Trobe’s then Department of Philosophy had an active research program in formal logic. As a discipline, logic has historically always lived uneasily at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics, though in recent times it has probably found its true home in computer science. The animating spirit then of La Trobe’s logic program was Tom Richards, I gather since retired from the university, who I had got to know. La Trobe, at the time, had a wonderful program of two-year research fellowships, which would be called post-doctoral fellowships in the United States, and which were, I believe, established by then La Trobe Vice Chancellor John Scott. These allowed the holder to do nothing but research in agreed areas. While still a Ph.D. student I talked to Tom about this and other research problems I was interested in pursuing. He encouraged me to apply for one of these research fellowships, and you were good enough to award me one. I remain extremely grateful to Tom for encouraging me initially to apply for this and for his strong support.
I held this fellowship from July 1979 to June 1981. It was a wonderful two years—I had excellent students and stimulating colleagues—let me mention, in particular, Ross Brady, who is still an active researcher here. I was able to interact with regular distinguished visitors, enjoyed good facilities, and had generous support from the department and university. It was a particularly rewarding two years, as it was the last time I was able to spend all my time completely focused on my research and absolutely nothing else. Unfortunately, my modest talents for administration meant that for the next 40 years I held positions that involved increasingly large amounts of administration until, as I am sure the Professor Dodds will sympathize, that’s pretty much all there was. I still recall those halcyon days at La Trobe when I was but a simple researcher and nothing but a simple researcher!
I have mentioned many ways in which my time at La Trobe was memorable and formative for me as a young researcher, but I want to highlight three.
First, the problem I speculated about in my Ph.D. thesis that I mentioned earlier became one of the major focuses of my research at La Trobe and for some years afterwards, resulting in a book, many papers and national and international conference presentations, various successful grant and equipment proposals, and a number of graduate student degrees. And it led on to my involvement in many other fields of information technology of which I never would have dreamed, leading eventually to my appointment as the first vice president for information technology, CIO and professor of computer science, and eventually the president for 14 years of a great American research university.
Second, I met and interacted with some outstanding La Trobe graduate students, and though it was rather unorthodox for a very recently minted Ph.D., I began supervising their research. I want to pay tribute to two of them, sadly both passed away far too young—Paul Thistlewaite, who moved to ANU with me in 1983 and received his Ph.D. there in 1984, and Anne Barca, who received an M.A. here in 1985. Paul was co-author of the book I mentioned above and was a superb computer programmer who did much of the programming work on which this book is based.
Third, it enabled me to travel overseas. After less than a year of research on the problem I mentioned above, I had a paper reporting on the first results I had obtained accepted for the premier international conference in this area being held in France. I made a request to the department, and school and funds were approved to allow me to travel to Europe in July 1980 to attend this conferences and visit a number of research groups in related areas. Though I did not fully appreciate it at the time, I quickly realized that I had stumbled into one of the sub-fields that was then central to artificial intelligence—called automated deduction, automated reasoning, or automated theorem proving. Before I knew it, I was caught up in the huge wave in AI at that time, which had been massively stimulated by the now-almost-forgotten Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project. This was arguably the third AI wave since the field’s founding in the early 1950s. However, by the late 1980s this wave was again crashing. But the impact of information technology and the ever-greater pervasiveness of computing and communications of constantly increasing power and capability, which had in turn fueled the explosion of access to the Internet, meant that IT was now permanently at the mainstream of science, research, business, industry, and society. And, of course, we are once again surfing an enormous AI wave that, this time, appears here to stay.
So, recalling the beginning of my academic career here at La Trobe University, and reflecting on 40 years’ experience in a wide variety of universities on two continents, there is much that I have been privileged to learn. But one thing maybe stands out above all. And that is how essential it is for universities to pursue and support basic and fundamental research. There will always be pressures on universities to do “relevant, practical, and applied research” and to play a central role in a region's or country’s economic development. This is only right and proper, especially for institutions that enjoy a considerable measure of taxpayer support. But universities must never lose sight of their vital and central obligation to pursue research and ideas at the outer limits of human thought. The massive artificial intelligence boom we are now seeing did not arise overnight as the result of a few years work recommended by a government committee. It was based on deep but recondite results in logic and mathematics proved in the 1930s, and then from the 1950s, successive waves of slow incremental progress, many dead ends, and, at times, outright hostility from funding and government agencies. But all through this, universities were refuges for those who continued the work that eventually led to the epochal advances we see today. There could be no better exempla of the great motto of your university “Whoever seeks shall find."
So, once again, thank you for the great honor you have bestowed on me today, for which I am deeply grateful. It is an honor I shall especially treasure coming from a university which has, since its founding less than 80 years ago, contributed so much to the vision of its namesake Charles La Trobe, of, in his words, “a highly educated community well versed in the arts and sciences."