Author: Kath Williamson

Research Insight: AI in Learning Analytics

Posted on by Kath Williamson

New publication from the CIRES team at The University of Queensland. Congratulations to PhD researcher Mehrnoush Mohammadi, Chief Investigators Assoc. Prof. Hassan Khosravi, Prof. Wojtek Tomaszewski, Centre Director Prof. Shazia Sadiq, and colleagues & co-authors Elham Tajik and Roberto Martinez-Maldonado. Full details & insights below.

“Delighted to share our newly published work, “Artificial Intelligence in Multimodal Learning Analytics: A Systematic Review,” in Computers & Education: Artificial Intelligence. We chart the evolving intersection of AI and Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA), providing the first comprehensive systematic review in this space. Huge Thanks to the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) for supporting this work!

What We Did: We reviewed 686 records (2019–2024), synthesising 43 peer-reviewed studies to develop a structured framework for integrating AI in the MMLA pipeline—from data collection and pre-processing to modelling and feedback.

Key Insights:
► AI is transforming MMLA’s modelling and analysis layers, but links to pedagogy and impact on learning remain underdeveloped.
► Research is concentrated in higher education and lab settings, with limited focus on early learning, diverse stakeholders, or ecological validity.
► While AI enhances real-time feedback and insight generation, challenges like small sample sizes, generalisability, and transparency persist.

Forward: With the rapid rise of generative AI, new opportunities are emerging to advance MMLA, enabling richer feedback, adaptive interventions, context-aware support, and deeper insights into human learning.

What opportunities or risks do you see in embedding AI across multimodal learning environments?

 

UQ AI PhD Showcase

Posted on by Kath Williamson

On the 26th and 27th June, the UQ AI Research Network, led by CIRES Director, Prof Shazia Sadiq, hosted the 2025 UQ AI PhD Showcase over two days at the St Lucia Campus. The event brought together over 40 PhD students from diverse disciplines, leading academics, industry experts, and members of the UQ community for two days of vibrant discussion, cutting-edge research presentations, and collaborative networking.

With AI continuing to reshape industries and societies worldwide, this showcase provided a timely platform for exploring the development, application, and implications of artificial intelligence across disciplines. From health and agriculture to digital safety and governance, the breadth of research on display highlighted UQ’s commitment to advancing responsible and impactful AI.

Special thanks to the organising team led by Dr Alina Bialkowski (Chair), CIRES CI Dr Rocky Chen, Dr Xin Yu, and Professor Shane Culpepper for an excellent event!

 

 

Tracking 20 Years of Coronavirus Research

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New publication and dataset from the CIRES team at Swinburne University of Technology. Congratulations to Chief Investigator Assoc. Prof. Amir Aryani, Data Engineer Zhuochen Wu, Postdoc Dr Hui Yin, and all their colleagues and co-authors for this important piece of work. Full details below.

“Excited to share our new paper, “Coronavirus research topics, tracking twenty years of research” published in Nature Scientific Data (June 2025). We have developed an AI-assisted pipeline to systematically catalogue and synthesise 800,000+ research articles on coronaviruses from 2002 to 2024. The result is a comprehensive dataset that organises this body of literature into key thematic clusters, from vaccine development to public health strategies and mental health impacts.

This work was supported by funding from Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES).

You can read the paper and access the dataset here.

 

Research Insight: Online AI Systems

Posted on by Kath Williamson
Delighted to share this research insight and latest work from CIRES PhD researcher Hongliang Niat The University of Queensland, supervised by Chief Investigator Prof. Gianluca Demartini. It proposes an operationalising research framework to enhance the harmlessness of foundation models. Full details below & link to paper: https://lnkd.in/geQrmj3i
“Excited to share my recent work, “Operationalising Harmlessness in Online AI Systems“, presented at ACM Web Conference 2025! Grateful for the guidance of my supervisor Professor Gianluca Demartini and the support of the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES). This project tackles the growing challenge of ensuring fairness, accountability, and legal compliance in foundation models—especially when operating under black-box constraints or without sensitive user data.
Approach:

► We propose an operationalising research framework for harmlessness, structured around three core questions:
► How do foundation models amplify dataset harm?
► How can we ensure harmlessness under strict black-box settings?
► What proactive explanation strategies meet legal and societal expectations?

Key Insights:
► Even with inclusive training data, foundation models exhibit performance disparities—our framework investigates dataset–model interactions to guide ethical design.
► Traditional fairness methods often require access to sensitive data. We propose Reckoner, a two-stage learning framework that ensures fairness without this requirement.
► We highlight the need for proactive algorithmic accountability, balancing transparency with IP protection and model security.
Future Directions
► Build compliance-ready harmlessness techniques tailored for real-world AI deployment.
► Enable dual-perspective fairness guidance—supporting both upstream model developers and downstream users.
Scan the poster QR code  to learn more.
How do you think we can ensure accountable and fair AI under real-world legal constraints?

Making Sense of Integrated Process Models

Posted on by Kath Williamson

CIRES Alumni, Tianwa Chen, is excited to share, “How Do Experts Make Sense of Integrated Process Models?“, accepted at the 36th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2025), to be held in Vienna, Austria, June 16–20, 2025.

“This paper presents the latest findings from my PhD research, in collaboration with a fantastic team: Barbara Weber, Graeme Shanks, CIRES CI Gianluca Demartini, CIRES Research Director, Marta Indulska, and CIRES Director, Shazia Sadiq. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together! This work advanced the understanding of sensemaking practices of process knowledge workers engaged in tasks on integrated modelling of business processes and rule. Utilizing cued-retrospective think-aloud interviews with eye-tracking as the cue, our study conducted a deep qualitative exploration that revealed diverse sensemaking practices and strategies experts employed during information foraging and information processing.”

Dr Rocky Chen awarded Lord Mayor’s Trailblazer Grant

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A huge congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Dr Rocky Chen who has been awarded the prestigious Lord Mayor’s Convention Trailblazer Grant. Congratulations Rocky!!

This important program led by the Brisbane Economic Development Agency (BEDA) is designed to support emerging leaders and help them bring international conferences to Brisbane. Dr Chen, a Senior Lecturer, data science researcher and ARC DECRA Fellow, will use the grant to attend a top-tier global computer science conference, such as the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining in Washington DC.

“This grant will allow me to advocate for my work on responsible data science to an international audience,” Dr Chen said. “It also gives me the opportunity to promote Brisbane as a future host city for one of the world’s most respected data mining conferences.”

Dr Chen’s research focuses on building trustworthy and scalable data mining systems – uncovering patterns in large datasets to support responsible decision-making across a range of sectors. He is also a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES), where he leads research on secure and ethical data practices in collaboration with industry and government.

“I’m incredibly honoured and excited to receive this recognition,” he said. “I look forward to working with BEDA to help bring a global event to Brisbane and further strengthen our city’s reputation as a centre for technological innovation.”

The Trailblazer Grant not only supports travel to international events but also empowers recipients to grow their leadership skills, build global networks, and attract investment and talent to Brisbane’s research ecosystem.

“I highly recommend the Trailblazer Grant to other early career researchers,” Dr Chen said. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to accelerate your career and broaden your impact. All you need is passion!”

Find out more about the Lord Mayor’s Convention Trailblazer Grant.

CIRES Team at The Web Conference in Sydney

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It’s been a big week for the CIRES Team from The University of Queensland at The Web Conference in Sydney!

CIRES PhD Researcher Elyas Meguellati gave two presentations, including a workshop paper titled “Are Large Language Models Good Data Preprocessors?” on investigating whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be good for cleaning text, and when to strategically alternate between LLMs and rule-based methods. The second day he presented his PhD topic, journey, and progress as part of the PhD Symposium. Elyas had the opportunity to be mentored by world renowned scholar in machine learning, Professor Irwin King from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“I received valuable input and questions from the scholars and audience to consider for my research. It was a great opportunity to make new friends and connections with similar interests from all over the globe,” said Elyas.

Our PhD Researcher Hongliang Ni also attended and presented her work on operationalising harmlessness in online AI systems.

“It was a fantastic experience attending the WWW-25 PhD Symposium. I was inspired by the breadth of research presented, especially through the keynotes and paper sessions. One key takeaway for me was recognising both the potential and the vulnerability of multi-agent frameworks. Moving forward, I believe it’s crucial to focus on building systems that are not only effective but also robust. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn, reflect, and connect with such a vibrant research community.”

CIRES Alum Dr Junliang Yu presented the Demo paper “BiasNavi: LLM-Empowered Data Bias Management.” BiasNavi is an LLM-powered toolkit developed by the Centre and designed to make bias management in data more accessible. It guides users through a structured, intelligent workflow – from bias detection to mitigation – leveraging the power of LLMs to streamline and simplify complex processes.

Congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator Prof. Gianluca Demartini and PhD researchers Stefano Civelli & Pietro Bernardelle who won the best paper award at the Workshop on Multimodal Content Analysis for Social Good for their work “The Impact of Persona-based Political Perspectives on Hateful Content Detection“. Great work team!

Thank you to the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery and www25 organisers for an excellent conference.

Lufan Zhang in Japan for CHI Conference

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Our PhD researcher Lufan Zhang from Swinburne University of Technology is in Japan for the CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international  of Human-Computer Interaction to present her work on Explainable AI. Congratulations Lufan!

“It’s such a pleasure to present our lbw work at CHI2025 in Yokohama, Japan. I came across another lbw work on the stats of XAI study that actually include human evidence of explainability, and it turned out that fewer than 1% of those XAI study include human study, among which less than a half involve the actual users into the design/development process of XAI approach… it poses a great opportunity for developing industry-based, context-aware XAI that involves the actual XAI stakeholder group into the co-design process of XAI to make the final solution useful and practical to address practioners’ prioritised needs.

Our work on “Placing Practice and Expertise at the Center of Explainable AI: A Participatory Design Approach to Explainable AI for Enterprise Information Architect” fills in the gap, where we believe industry practitioners have the agency in developing XAI approaches, and “explainability” in this study is seen as “a human-centred capability that practitioners develop to understand, interpret, and make AI useful in their work practices”. https://lnkd.in/gj4edj9m

Big shoutouts to our amazing industry partner Astral  Marie Felsbourg (Minson) GAICD & Damian Felsbourg GAICD and their clients & our research center ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES), Swinburne University of Technology and Paul Scifleet for the ongoing support to produce the work we present here!”

 

STA’s Science Meets Parliament 2025

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CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq, attended Science & Technology Australia’s Science Meets Parliament initiative. This annual event fosters meaningful connections between the STEM sector and policymakers. 2025 celebrated 25 years of SMP on 12 and 13 February.

Science Meets Parliament features a comprehensive training program designed to strengthen relationships between federal Parliamentarians and professionals in science and technology. It plays a vital role in integrating STEM expertise into national service. Participants gain valuable insights into effective engagement strategies with policymakers, while federal Parliamentarians have the opportunity to connect with leading experts in science and technology. This national gathering brings together STEM leaders for expert-led professional development, a welcome reception, a Parliamentary forum, a national gala dinner, a televised address at the National Press Club, and intimate meetings with Parliamentarians in small group settings. A highlight of the Parliamentary calendar, Science Meets Parliament provides exceptional opportunities to enhance the visibility and understanding of STEM within Parliament and Australian Government Departments.

Professor Shazia Sadiq convenes panel at ACSW 2025

Posted on by Kath Williamson

The 2025 Australasian Computer Science Week, ACSW, will be held at The University of Queensland, 10th – 14th Feb 2025.

On 11 February, CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq will convene a panel entitled “The vital role of Computing Researchers in Science Advocacy”. She is joined by panellists:

  • Professor Ben Rubenstein, The University of Melbourne
  • Professor Anton van den Hengel, The University of Adelaide
  • Kylie Walker, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
  • Ann Nicholson, Monash University

About the Panel: Computing research is often celebrated for its transformative contributions to diverse fields such as health, energy, agriculture, and more. However, this narrative frequently casts computer science as merely an enabling discipline, sidelining the critical role of fundamental computing research in shaping scientific and technological progress.

This panel aims to challenge this perception and advocate for computing researchers as first-class citizens in science advocacy. Bringing together leading experts, this discussion will spotlight the unique contributions of computing research—from theoretical breakthroughs to paradigm-shifting advancements in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and quantum computing.

Panelists will explore why these foundational innovations deserve recognition not just for their application potential but as pivotal drivers of scientific inquiry and discovery. The session will delve into strategies for elevating the visibility of computing researchers within broader scientific advocacy frameworks. How can the computing community assert its role in shaping research agendas, influencing policy, and inspiring the next generation of scientists? What messaging and collaborations are needed to emphasize computing as a cornerstone of scientific advancement? Join us to redefine the narrative and ensure that the voices of computing researchers are central to the future of science advocacy.

CIRES Attends SWIRL 2025

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CIRES Chief Investigator, Professor Gianluca Demartini participated in the Fourth Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (SWIRL) in Lorne Victoria from 9-12 February 2025.

SWIRL is an invitation-only gathering of the leading international researchers who come together every 5-6 years to collaboratively develop a research roadmap for Information Retrieval research for the next 5+ years. The reports produced in previous SWIRL workshops are highly cited and have been influential on the research done by both academia and industry in Information Retrieval. The final report will be made available in the SIGIR Forum Journal.

Promotion Congratulations to Prof Gianluca Demartini

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Congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Gianluca Demartini on his promotion to Professor at The University of Queensland!

Gianluca says: “I’m happy to share that I have been promoted to Professor at The University of Queensland. I have worked at UQ for 7 years (it’s the place I’ve worked the longest in my career!) and have been promoted twice since I joined. Thanks to all my PhD students and postdocs that over the years made this possible. Thanks also to all my mentors within UQ and beyond for all their amazing advice and support! Looking forward to the next challenge!”

Promotion Congratulations to A/Prof Ida Asadi Someh

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Congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Ida Asadi Someh on her promotion to Associate Professor at The University of Queensland!

Ida says: “I’m happy to share that I have been promoted to Associate Professor at The University of Queensland! While I’ve been fortunate to have a fantastic network supporting and cheering me on, I want to give a special shout-out to three extraordinary women who have been instrumental in this stage of my career: Barb Wixom, Marta Indulska, and Shazia Sadiq. Your guidance, mentorship, and friendship have been invaluable. You’ve helped me become a better researcher, a stronger leader, and a more well-rounded person and mother. Thank you for championing my growth and helping me navigate the complexities of this demanding career path. I am truly indebted to you!”

Information Resilience at ADC2024

Posted on by Kath Williamson

CIRES  had a strong representation at the 35th Australasian Database Conference (ADC’24) with CIRES CIs Professor Hongzhi Yin and Dr Rocky Chen as the General Chair and Program Chair, respectively. ADC’24 has taken an innovative twin-city approach to host the conference in two cities, namely Gold Coast and Tokyo, where major events like keynotes were broadcasted and synced between two sites. By doing so, this conference was taken out of the Australasian region for the first time.

Additionally, the ADC’24 award committee recognised CIRES Centre Director Professsor Shazia Sadiq as a strong contributor to Australasia’s data management research with its Lifetime Contribution Award. Congratulations!

And as part of the ADC program, on December 18th 2024, CIRES hosted a highly engaging Information Resilience Bootcamp. 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!

Posted on by Kath Williamson

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!

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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

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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.”

Dr Rocky Chen, Early Career Research Leadership Award

Posted on by Kath Williamson

Congratulations to our Chief Investigator and UQ School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science lecturer Dr Rocky Chen who received the 2024 Early Career Research Leadership Award from the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology.

The award recognises Rocky’s significant contributions in “actively shaping the research community by delivering tutorials at prestigious conferences like WWW and DASFAA, promoting AI’s trustworthiness, security, and resource-efficiency in online services. His commitment to training ECRs is evident through organising the Australia wide Information Resilience PhD Schools, has benefited hundreds of scholars across Australia.”

Congratulations Rocky!!

Prof Hongzhi Yin: HDR Supervision Excellence Award

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Congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator, Professor Hongzhi Yin who was awarded the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology [EAIT] 2024 Higher Degree Research Supervision Excellence Award recognizing his outstanding contribution to individual supervision and to enhancing the research supervision culture.

Testimonial: “Now, as a senior lecturer myself, I apply many of the HDR training strategies I learned from Hongzhi in supervising my own PhD students… Hongzhi also taught me how to nurture the research capabilities of HDR students by guiding them in setting appropriate research plans and topics to maximize their potential.”

CIRES attends Blue Sky Queensland

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Thanks to the Queensland Futures Institute for hosting Blue Sky Queensland. CIRES PhD Researcher Krishna Dermawan and Senior Research Assistant Tianwa Chen from The University of Queensland joined the event and were so impressed by the conversations and lineup of fantastic speakers including Professor John Fraser, Prof. Marek Kowalkiewicz, Mark Mauceri, and Kristen Souvlis.

From Tina: “Today’s seminar was very inspiring, and it was an incredible forum for exploring the future of Queensland. The speakers delivered diverse and thought-provoking insights on healthcare, AI, rocket science, and the Arts. As an early career researcher, their talks inspired my research, and I’m looking forward to attending future events!”

From left to right: Tianwa Chen, Prof. Marek Kowalkiewicz, Krishna Dermawan