Professor James Harland
Details
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College: Learning, Teaching and Quality
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Department: Learning, Teaching and Quality
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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james.harland@rmit.edu.au
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ORCID: 0000-0001-8640-5137
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
- Media enquiries
About
James Harland is the Director of the STEM Hub for Digital Innovation and a Professor in Computational Logic. The Hub for Digital Innovation (or HuDINi for short) is focused on enhancing STEM learning and teaching via digital technologies. This includes work on mixed reality (including headsets and immersive experiences like the Nova virtual vehicle), robotics, large screens, haptic gloves, motion capture suits, and related applications. Much of this work takes place in the Virtual Experience Lab with a variety of colleauges including other acadamics, students and industry partners. He is also known internationally for his work on intelligent agent systems, automated reasoning, logic programming, Turing machines and computer science education.
Professor Harland has been at RMIT since 1994, and has over 30 years of experience in research and teaching. His work centres on the relationship between computation and logical reasoning, particularly in the areas of mathematical logic and proof theory. His early work focused on logic programming and automated reasoning, which involve the interpretation of concepts of logic for programming applications. This was particularly concentrated on resource-sensitive logics, such as linear logic. More recent work has extended this direction into reasoning methods for intelligent agent systems, such as those which control robots. This uses the beliefs and goals of the agents to reason about the most appropriate action to take. This work has also been applied to intelligent narratives.
He is also interested in computer science education, and together with some colleagues from RMIT and others from UTS, QUT, Monash and Newcastle, he was a key contributor to the BABELnot project, funded by a grant from the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT), from 2011 to 2013, which developed an epistemology of competency in computer programming. This work has continued at RMIT with the development of a database of exam questions based on the outcomes of the BABELnot project.
A further interest is Turing machines and similar automata. In particular, he has worked on the busy beaver problem, which centres around the maximal outputs that can be generated from machines of a limited size, and methods to recognise universal Turing machines.
Supervisor projects
- Implementation of OSCE in health professional education
- 20 Dec 2023
- Cultural Aspects of Requirements Engineering
- 22 Dec 2022
- Intelligent Utilisation of Digital Resources in Higher Education: The Case for Developing Content in a Learning Management System
- 23 Aug 2021
- Travel Efficiency Investigation: Unravelling Local and Global Insights via Taxi Trajectory Analysis
- 6 May 2021
- Converging Technology and Engineering pedagogy to achieve creative mindset of students for startup industry
- 26 Apr 2021
- An Empirical Study of Computational Thinking Education in Remote Primary Schools
- 15 Dec 2020
- Enabling Modelling of Spatial Scenarios with Indexable Variables in PRISM
- 26 Jul 2019
- Journalists' Information Seeking and Behaviour on Social Media
- 5 Jul 2017
- An Integrated Framework For Learning Analytics
- 16 May 2017
- Cultural Influences on Requirements Engineering Activities
- 3 Apr 2017
- Effectiveness of Project-Based Computer Science and Information Technology Courses in the First and Final Year of University in Terms of Students' Readiness, Attitudes and Academic Achievements
- 31 Aug 2016
- BDI Player Modelling for Interactive Narratives
- 31 Oct 2013
- Making a Choice: The Melete Effect and Establishing a Poetics for Choice-Based Narratives
- 28 Feb 2013
Teaching interests
Supervisor interests
Logic programming; linear logic; proof theory; automated reasoning; agent programming languages; goals in agent systems; reasoning techniques for agent systems and other complex applications; formal methods; the busy beaver problem; universal Turing machines; computer science education.
Key Activities
Professor Harland has taught a number of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level, including Computing Theory. This is a course that computing students find conceptually difficult, and one for which he has become particularly well known. In 2007, he received a Carrick (now OLT) citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning for his work in this course at RMIT. He is also an Approved Peer Reviewer at RMIT, an invitation-only position.
More recent teaching duties have included Introduction to Information Technology, Software Requirements Engineering, Mathematical Logic and Logic Programming, and Building IT Systems. This latter course is a relatively new one, in which students form teams to work on a “moonshot” project in the first semester of their first year. This then forms their entire syllabus for the course.
Professor Harlandhas previously been the Program Advisor for the Software Engineering program, and also the Program Director for offshore activities of the School, including at RMIT’s campus in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and at Taylors College in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. He has also marketed the Schools programs in Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, and India.
