Who is this Richard Lobb guy, anyway?

Photo of Richard Richard Lobb, MSc PhD
Adjunct Senior Fellow
Department of Computer Science
The University of Canterbury
A Brief History of Time
I moved to Christchurch at the beginning of 2004 after many years at the University of Auckland, where I used to head the Graphics Research Group. My theory at the time was that I would retire from academia (I sometimes used the term "escape"), maybe work in the computing industry, and spend lots of time tramping in the mountains. Well, nearly 20 years on and my plans are still somewhat incomplete: I did at least escape from Auckland, and I've avoided most of the worst aspects of academia (bureaucracy, administration and the career rat-race). I did get lots of tramping done, though that has dropped off in recent years. Nowadays I content myself mostly with walks in the Port Hills. I never did put any effort into getting back into the computing industry for the simple reason that despite my grumbles and cynicism, I actually thoroughly enjoy teaching, playing with computers, tinkering with research problems, and generally hanging around Universities. Particularly this one :-)
Courses I teach
Mostly I teach programming courses, since I'm passionate about programming. [Sad, sad, I hear you say. Well, it works for me.] This year, 2023, I'm teaching the following course in both semesters: This was a new course in 2021, compulsory for all engineering students. With a total enrolment over the two semesters of around 1300 students, it has been a fun ride getting it set up in the first place and then navigating it through two COVID-affected years.
Programming Contests
In 2010 I got asked to be the nominal "coach" of one of the Computer Science Department's teams competing in the ACM ICPC Regional Contest. The team's subsequent success in winning the NZ section of the contest led to my accompanying the team to the World Finals in Harbin, China, somewhat to my embarrassment. My involvement in programming contests subsequently increased steadily and I've accompanied two other teams to the World Finals, in Orlando, USA in 2011 and Warsaw, Poland, in 2012. I spent some years as acting chair of the NZ Olympiad in Informatics, resigning in 2014. I have been heavily involved with the Divisional and Regional contests in the South Pacific Region of the ICPC, and was one of the three judges for three years.

Our local programming teams continue to do well on the local scene and out top team has won the Tertiary Senior section of the New Zealand Programming Contest for the last two years.

Other stuff

In lieu of actually getting a life, computer programming is also a recreational activity of mine. I've devoted a fair chunk of my time over many years developing the CodeRunner plug-in for Moodle. This allows us to set Moodle quiz questions of the "write a program (or function, or class etc) that ..." variety, for which the answer is program code. The CodeRunner module runs the code against a set of test cases to grade it. CodeRunner can run code in multiple languages and includes a flexible templating feature that lets us set a wide variety of other question types with arbitrary HTML user interfaces. CodeRunner is now used in most of our courses that involve any programming and is used at over 2000 other institutions around the world, too.

My kids, Anwen and Michael, are thoroughly grown up now so my "Dad" role is rather nominal nowadays. Anwen lives with her husband Kurt on a small lifestyle block near Kaitaia. They enjoy the Far North fishing and horse riding. Michael lives in Cromwell, where he runs an audio-visual hire and event-staging company called IGW Event Technology".

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