CAWCR

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Education:

• Monash University, 1969, B.Sc. (Hons) Major in Mathematics
• Monash University, 1973, M.Sc. (Differential Geometry)
• University of Melbourne, 1977, Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Science
• University of Melbourne, 1995, PhD (Computer Vision)

Interests and Research:

I am with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, working with the Weather Forecasting group on interpretation of radar images, intelligent alerts and automatic weather event detection systems.

The research includes designing a system to use artificial intelligence and computer vision to take the output from radar and other possible data sources such as satellite images, observations, and model data, and fuse them into high-level interpretations using a network of agents. Possible scenarios are thunderstorm warning systems around airports, storm prediction systems from various meteorological intputs, and processing Doppler radar images to remove aliasing. This work builds upon other radar display and interpretation systems such as Rapic, Titan and MIGFA. 

Publications:

• Current
  • Thunderstorm Strike Probability Nowcasting by S. Dance, E. Ebert and D. Scurrah. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, vol 27 no 1, 2010, p79-93.
  • Thunderstorm Strike Probability Nowcasting, a New Algorithm by S. Dance, E. Ebert and D. Scurrah. Proceedings of the iEMSs Fourth Biennial Meeting: International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs 2008), Barcelona, Spain, 2008, pp1586-1593. (talk).
  • The Australian Nowcasting System by John Bally, Tony Bannister, Kevin Cheong, Sandy Dance, Tom Keenan and Phil Purdam. 33rd AMS Conference on Radar Meteorology Cairns, Australia, 2007.
  • An XML format for nowcast data by E. Ebert, S. Dance, D. Scurrah, R. Potts and E. Dozortseva. 33rd AMS Conference on Radar Meteorology Cairns, Australia, 2007.
  • Verification of Operational Thunderstorm Nowcasts by E. Ebert, T. Keenan, J. Bally and S. Dance World Weather Research Program Symposium on Nowcasting and Very Short Range Forecasting, Toulouse, France, 5-9 Sept 2005, paper 8.12.
  • Implementing Industrial Multi-Agent Systems using JACK(tm) by Rick Evertz, Martyn Fletcher, Richard Jones, Jacquie Jarvis, James Brusey and Sandy Dance, Programming Mutli-Agent Systems, First International Workshop, ProMAS 2003, editors Mehdi Dastani, Jurgen Dix and Amal el Fallah Seghrouchni, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, 2004, pp18-48.
  • Talk on Intelligent Agents in Bureau for ICS04, Brisbane, July 2004
  • An evolving multi-agent system for meteorological alerts by Sandy Dance, Mal Gorman, Lin Padgham and Michael Winikoff, in Autonomous Agents and MultiAgents Systems (AAMAS03), ACM Press, New York, pp966-967. Melbourne, Australia, July 2003.
  • An Open Meteorological Alerting System: Issues and Solutions by Ian Mathieson, Sandy Dance, Lin Padgham, Malcolm Gorman and Michael Winikoff. Computer Science 2004, Twenty-Seveth Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC2004) Vol 26 Dunedin, NZ, 2004.
  • Agent-Based Alerting for Forecasters by Sandy Dance, Malcolm Gorman, Lin Padgham, Michael Winikoff and Ian Mathieson. Combined preprints of the 84th AMS Annual Meeting Seattle, WA, 2004. (not presented)
  • A deployed multi agent system for meteorological alerts by Sandy Dance, Mal Gorman, Lin Padgham and Michael Winikoff, in Deployed Applications of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Workshop, part of AAMAS03, pp19-26. Melbourne, Australia, July 2003. (talk)
  • Intelligent Agents in the Australian Bureau of Meteorology by Sandy Dance and Mal Gorman, in Challenges in Open Agent Systems Workshop, in Autonomous Agents and MultiAgents Systems (AAMAS02). Bologna, Italy, July 2002. (talk)
  • Microburst Detection using Agent Networks by Sandy Dance and Rodney Potts, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, vol 19 no 5, May 2002, p646-653.
  • Dynamic Image Sequence Analysis Using Fuzzy Measures by Zhi-Qiang Liu, Leonard T. Bruton, James C. Bezdek, James M. Keller, Sandy Dance, Norman R. Bartley, and Cishen Zhang, in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics part B: Cybernetics, vol 31, no 4, August 2001, p557-572.
  • An Agent Network for Microburst Detection, by Sandy Dance, in Fifth IEEE workshop on applications of computer vision, Palm Springs, CA, December 2000, p100-105.
  • The Sydney 2000 Forecast Demonstration Project by Keenan, T., Bally, J., May, P., Purdam, P., Freeman, G., Potts, R., Dance, S., Seed, A., Wilson, J., Joe, P., Conway, B., Golding, B. and Collier, C., in Bull. Aust. Meteor. and Oceanogr. Soc.. vol 13, 2000, p63-66.
  • Interpretation of Radar Image Sequences by Sandy Dance, in Conference Proceedings DICTA99, Digital Image Computing, Techniques, and Applications. Perth, Dec 1999, p186-190.

   

PhD thesis: Picture Interpretation

Book: Picture Interpretation: a Symbolic Approach by Sandy Dance, Terry Caelli and Zhi-Qiang Liu (155 pages), published by World Scientific Publishing Co., series in Machine Perception Artificial Intelligence,1995.

Positions and Committees:

• member coordinating committee of Agents Victoria

Legacy BMRC page.
Alternate page.