Information Resilience Bootcamp at ADC2024

On December 18th 2024, the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) hosted a highly engaging Information Resilience Bootcamp in collaboration with ADC2024 at the beautiful Gold Coast!

The bootcamp featured four outstanding presentations, each shedding light on cutting-edge advancements in data and information resilience:

Tingting Wang (RMIT): Discovering and Assembling Data in Tabular Data Lakes – Explored advanced methods for uncovering and integrating structured data from vast tabular data repositories to enhance usability and insights.

Zixin Wang (CIRES, The University of Queensland): Online Test-Time Adaptation: A Journey Through Lost and Found – Delved into adaptive learning techniques for real-time model adjustment in dynamic environments, ensuring robust performance despite unseen distributions.

Junliang Yu (CIRES, The University of Queensland): Leveraging Large Language Models for Data Bias Management – Highlighted the potential of large language models to detect, manage, and mitigate biases in data systems to improve fairness and integrity.

Xin Xia (The University of Queensland): On-Device Recommendation Powered by Language Models  – Unveiled the promise of language model-powered recommendation systems operating directly on devices to deliver personalized and efficient user experiences.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the incredible speakers for their invaluable contributions and to everyone who joined us for this inspiring event! Your engagement and enthusiasm made the bootcamp a tremendous success.

Let’s continue to drive innovation and resilience in the face of evolving information challenges!

Winners of our inaugural CIRES Best Demo Award!

We are pleased to announce the winners of our inaugural CIRES Best Demo Award!

Congratulations to PhD Researchers Elyas Meguellati and Stefano Civelli from The University of Queensland who received a $1,000 AUD prize for their demo, the Ad Persuasion Dashboard – Insights into Facebook Political Campaign Strategies.

The demo presents an interactive dashboard to analyse persuasive content in political advertising on social media. Focusing on Facebook ads from the 2022 Australian Federal Election campaign, it uses a state-of-the-art lightweight model for persuasive text detection. The web application allows users to gain insights through visualisations of comparative spend and impressions on high vs. low persuasion ads, time series analysis of ad impressions, and demographic targeting patterns. The tool enhances transparency in digital pollical campaigning by enabling researchers and the public to explore persuasion strategies employed in social media advertising.

This work has been submitted to the ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2025. Future applications and work identified include more analyses to be shown and the ability for other researchers to upload their dataset.

Elyas’s PhD project, titled ‘The Duality of Persuasion,’ delves into both the generation and detection aspects of persuasive communication. On the generation side, his research focuses on creating tailored messages that align with specific personality traits, while the detection side emphasizes identifying persuasive techniques in textual content. He is supervised by Profs. Gianluca Demartini and Shazia Sadiq.

Stefano’s PhD research is focused on developing novel methodologies for measuring and understanding prompt complexity in Large Language Models (LLMs). His work aims to identify and quantify the key factors that contribute to prompt complexity, with practical applications ranging from optimal model selection to response quality prediction. Working under the supervision of Prof. Gianluca Demartini, his research aims to advance our understanding of how to more effectively interact with and deploy LLMs in real-world applications

Find out more:

Dashboard url

Video demonstration

Pictured L to R: Elyas Meguellati, Prof. Shazia Sadiq, Dr Junliang Yu, & Stefano Civelli at CIRES HQ.

2024 Information Resilience PhD School at UQ!

Thank you to all our delegates and speakers who participated in the CIRES Information Resilience PhD School 2024 hosted at The University of Queensland.  We are delighted to share the final resources from the 2024 School, including the highlights video and playlist of all talks, technical tutorials, and panel discussions available from the links below. You can also view all presenter slides, plus PhD poster and photo gallery. Thank you again to all our expert presenters!


Congratulations to our 2024 Award Winners!

Three-Minute-Thesis Competition – Session A

First Place: Daniel Claassen, The University of Western Australia
Quantifying Mechanistic Model Uncertainty

Runner Up: Nardiena Pratama, The University of Queensland
Enhancing Breast Cancer Classification with LLM-Generated Textual Descriptions

People’s Choice: Fidan Karimova, The University of Queensland
Data As a Service Architecture

Three-Minute-Thesis Competition – Session B

First Place: Marcus Dyson, The University of Western Australia
Improving Forecasts of Imperfect Models using Piecewise Stochastic Processes

Runner Up: Niraj Yadav, Western Sydney University
Liquid gold: Human urine derived fertilizer

People’s Choice: Masoud Kamali, The University of Melbourne
Zero-Shot 3D Object Detection

Poster Session

First Place: Hrishi Patel, The University of Queensland
EMIT – Event-Based Masked Auto Encoding for Irregular Time Series

Runner Up: Lufan Zhang, Swinburne University of Technology
Enterprise Information Management from a Digital Forensics Perspective: Explainable AI for Enterprise Information Architecture

People’s Choice: Munia Ahamed, The University of Technology Sydney
Enhancing Seamless Manufacturing through Human-Cobot Collaboration: Optimizing Quality Assurance, Knowledge Transfer and Adoption Strategy


2024 PHD SCHOOL PHOTO GALLERY


2024 RESEARCH POSTER GALLERY


Watch the 2024 Highlights Video


2024 PRESENTATIONS – YOUTUBE PLAYLIST

 

Panel Discussions


Seeking Project Data

CIRES at ACIS 2024 in Canberra

CIRES is at Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2024)! This week our Research Director Prof. Marta Indulska, and PhD researchers Jorge Retamales, Hui Zhou, and Tianwa Chen are in Canberra for the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) 2024 at the University of Canberra.

Hui presented the paper “Influence of Metadata on Quality Evaluation of Unstructured Information Artefacts” co-authored with Profs. Gianluca Demartini, Marta Indulska, and Shazia Sadiq. Tina presented “Estimating Gender Completeness in Wikipedia” co-authored with CIRES PhD researcher Hrishikesh Patel, Dr. Ivano Bongiovanni GAICD, and Prof. Gianluca Demartini.

ACIS is the premier conference in the region for the Information Systems discipline and this year marks the 35th year. This year’s program focuses on Digital Futures for a Sustainable Society and included a plenary talk for the Doctoral Consortium from our Chief Investigator Prof. Andrew Burton-Jones on “The Academic Journey: Some Australasian Thoughts.”