“I did my honours degree in theoretical physics, building a
computer simulation of a proposed interferometer based gravity wave
observatory. That was a lot of fun, but I wanted something a little
different for my PhD, so after looking around a bit I ended up
studying automatic speech recognition in the Computer Sciences
Laboratory at the Australian National University (ANU).“As so often happens in research the really novel ideas that
came out of my work were a long way from the original project, so
after a few years I ended up changing topics to reflect the
direction that my research was taking. My thesis ended up being on
efficient methods of sorting and transmitting data, with perhaps
the best known result being the development of the ‘rsync
algorithm’ for efficient remote update of files…”