Congratulations to our Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Javad Pool who received the prestigious ACPHIS PhD Medal last week. It is awarded annually for the best Australian PhD thesis in the discipline of Information Systems. Find out more about Javad’s award winning thesis.
Author: Kath Williamson
CIRES participates in Australasian Conference on Information Systems
A number of CIRES students and staff participated in the 34th Australasian Conference on Information Systems [ACIS 2023] 5-8 December 2023, Wellington New Zealand.
CIRES posdoctoral researcher, Dr Javad Pool, shared his PhD journey as part of the ACIS Doctoral Consortium program, as well as presenting his research paper at the main conference.
CIRES students, Daisy Xu presented her current research into “Transforming Data to Value: a Multi-Case Study” at the ACIS 2023 Doctoral Consortium, while Jorge Retamales, presented his research paper “Becoming data-driven: Integrating inertia and dynamic capabilities perspectives” at the main conference.
Dr Javad Pool – 2023 Award for Excellence
Congratulations to our CIRES Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Javad Pool who has received a 2023 Award for Excellence from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law (BEL) at The University of Queensland.
The award was for Research – Engagement and Impact, within the Trust in AI Research Team working with Professor Nicole Gillespie, Dr Caitlin Curtis, and Dr Steven Lockey.
“I’m honoured to receive this BEL Award for Excellence 2023 alongside the Trust in AI Research Team. Professor Nicole Gillespie’s leadership in this research has been inspiring, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Nicole, Steve, and Caitlin on impactful projects highlighted in the media, in policy, and in industry reports.”
Congratulations Javad!
Find out more about this research
ARC Discovery Projects 2024 Success
Big congratulations to CIRES CIs who have been awarded 2024 ARC Discovery Projects:
Professor Zi Huang; Dr Tong Chen; Dr Yadan Luo; Dr Sen Wang; Professor Shazia Sadiq: Video-sharing platforms are a critical information channel for the public. Increasing scale and shifts in user base, with Generation Z now as the dominant user, have resulted in an unprecedented amount of ubiquitous changes in the content and users of these platforms which greatly challenges the responsiveness and quality of the services provided. This project aims to design innovative algorithms to effectively predict and leverage changes, optimise the value of changes, and extract insights from changes for diverse downstream applications of video-sharing platforms. The expected outcomes will create new-generation representation learning techniques, and provide practical tools to amplify the socioeconomic values of video-sharing platforms.
Dr Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen; Associate Professor Hongzhi Yin: AI-powered recommender systems provide recommendations for daily lives, but they need to be legally interpretable and explainable. This project aims to transform existing black-box recommender models into transparent and trustworthy decision-support systems. The resulting tools will offer granular, explorable rationales for the recommendations in real time, creating greater public confidence while advancing the field. The expected outcomes include graph embedding methods for capturing real-world relationships in all their messiness and complexity. The anticipated contributions include impartial and accountable recommender models that are resistant to adversarial attacks and that slow the spread of misinformation.
Promotion Success
We would like to share the exciting news of recent promotion successes of CIRES CIs. Please join us to congratulate:
- Professor Hongzhi Yin
- Associate Professor Sen Wang
- Senior Lecturer Rocky Chen
ITRP Managers Symposium
On 16-17 October, CIRES Centre Manager Kate Aldridge and Coordinator Kathleen Williamson attended the 2023 ARC National ITRP Managers Symposium held in Adelaide; meeting with ARC representatives and fellow Managers from across Australia and sharing tips, insights and experience in the operational management of our ARC Hubs and Training Centres. This important knowledge sharing and problem solving event, also included a professional training session “Speaking with Influence” presented by Gary Edwards which provided many tactics and strategies to improve communication, and get better results in any situation. Below is a photo of the UQ representatives at the Symposium.
Why data-smart leaders create teams of “purple people”
“Data Is Everybody’s Business” by Barb Wixom, Leslie Owens, and Cynthia Beath with MIT CISR (MIT Center for Information Systems Research) features contributions from CIRES Chief Investigator, Ida Asadi Someh. The excerpt features content that is available in academic form in Journal of Association for Information Systems – https://lnkd.in/gWUW7Gx4
Ida’s collaborator, Barbara Wixom, is a CIRES International Expert Panel Member.
UQ AI Research Network Launches
UQ Research and Innovation Week 2023 saw the launch of the University’s new Research Networks, which provide a platform for a collaborative and transdisciplinary approach to fields of research with broad impacts across society. In opening the event, Professor Shazia Sadiq, CIRES Centre Director, and Director of the UQ AI Collaboratory commented on the enormity of recent advancements in AI, and the profound impact it can have on science, business and society. This prompted the establishment of the UQ AI Collaboratory in 2021.
Welcome to Data Engineer Zhuochen Wu
We’d like to welcome Zhuochen Wu to CIRES! Zhuochen joined the Centre as a Data Engineer in November 2022 and is based at Swinburne University of Technology. Her main work includes data curation, resilient data pipelines, graph databases and distributed ETL systems, with a focus on data extraction and analytics pipeline integration. Zhuochen has a degree of Master of Computing with Data Science specialisation from the Australian National University. She works closely with Chief Investigator Associate Professor Amir Aryani. She is excited by the diverse projects within the Centre and is looking forward to collaborating with other researchers to find meaningful insights from data.
Welcome to Data Engineer Shaoyang Fan
We’d like to welcome Dr Shaoyang Fan to CIRES! Shaoyang joined CIRES as a Data Engineer in July 2023 at The University of Queensland. Shaoyang is a data scientist and specialises in microtask crowdsourcing, data quality, and bias. He works closely with Chief Investigator Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini, working in data curation and human computation research, including constructing crowd-sourced data curation processes. He has a PhD in Computer Science and Master of Science in Information Technology, both from UQ, and Master of Science in Econometrics from The University of Manchester.
Shaoyang is looking forward to applying his technical skills and passion for data science to make impactful contributions to the Centre.
Dr Sen Wang CI for new ARC Training Centre in Predictive Breeding in Agriculture
Congratulations to School of EECS, Professor Helen Huang, and CIRES CI, Dr Sen Wang, for the successful $5M funding of the ARC Training Centre in Predictive Breeding for Agricultural Futures. The Centre will train the next generation of breeders and develop cutting-edge predictive breeding technologies in partnership with industry. The Centre will train 31 PhDs, seven Postdocs and perform research across 21 agriculturally important species. The Centre brings together significant contributions from five Australian universities and 30 national and international partner organisations, and now the ARC, to a total value of $136M.
Best Paper Award ICTIR 2023
Congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini and fellow authors who received the Best Paper Award for their work “Perspectives on Large Language Models for Relevance Judgment” https://lnkd.in/gmf3qU97
The work is the result of an international collaboration between researchers in Italy, USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, and Japan, who highlight the risks and opportunities of large language models and their impact on information retrieval research. The award was given by a committee of information retrieval experts at the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery‘s SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval in Taipei last week.
Computational Social Science Reading group
We have a number of reading groups happening across the Centre and it’s a key part of our cross-collaboration between our university partners Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Queensland.
Great conversation in the Computational Social Science Reading group led by CIRES Postdoc Dr Hui Yin, PhD researchers Pa Pa Khin and Lufan Zhang, and Dr Javad Pool, around AI-enabled knowledge sharing and learning.
Swinburne University of Technology, hosted our second Computational Social Science Reading group with the collaboration of colleagues at the University of Queensland, part of the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES).
Dr. Hui Yin leads the conversation today with a focus on a paper about knowledge management titled ” AI-enabled knowledge sharing and learning: redesigning roles and processes” (https://lnkd.in/g8xSTg3c). Pa Pa Khin gave a detailed introduction to this paper. This research paper provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing AI’s impact on various practices in knowledge management, and it uncovers the vital necessity of tailored AI-enabled knowledge management systems to cater to modern knowledge worker demands. We had a productive conversation about the role of AI in facilitating organizational knowledge sharing and learning, and how it can support knowledge management activities.
Keynote at 2023 ACM SIGMOD/PODS
CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq presented a keynote “DEI Perspectives in Information Technology Education” on June 21 at the 2023 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data, Seattle, Washington, USA.
Information Technology (IT) has become deeply intertwined with business and society across many sectors such as health, transport, manufacturing, and education is no exception. In this talk I will outline some of the challenges in education resulting from increasingly diverse student populations and shifts in delivery modes for learning. I will also share experiences and strategies for embedding DEI perspectives in education of, for and with Information Technology.
NSTC Rapid Response on Generative AI
On 6 June, Hon Ed Husic MP, Minister for Industry and Science, launched the NSTC Rapid Response on Generative AI: https://lnkd.in/gfbb5f8c. The development of the report was drawn together through the National Science and Technology Council, guided by its Executive Officer and Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Cathy Foley . The work was led by Professors Genevieve Bell, Jean Burgess, Shazia Sadiq and Julian Thomas, drawing on critical input from peers across academia.
Welcome to Postdoctoral Research Fellow Javad Pool
Welcome to Dr Javad Pool who joins CIRES as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland.
Javad completed his PhD in Business Information Systems with the UQ Business School, focusing on data privacy, and the effective use of information systems, particularly in the digital health context.
He will work closely with Professors Shazia Sadiq, Marta Indulska, Andrew Burton-Jones, and Dr Ida Asadi Someh. His research aims to understand and address socio-technical challenges in information systems, including data governance, privacy, trust, data breaches, misinformation, the effective use of data, and data protection. Javad is looking forwarding to collaborating with a diverse range of stakeholders to advance research on information resilience and data protection practices.
Welcome Javad!
CIRES Presentation to Google
The Head of Research of Google Australia, Dr Grace Chung, visited UQ on 5 June. Prof Marta Indulska presented an overview of CIRES and research into Responsible AI, while Dr Hassan Khosravi spoke on Education and AI. Research discussion revolved around AI, particularly in the space of AI for Health, and Language, Search and Recommendation.
Welcome to New CIRES CI, Dr Rocky Chen
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Rocky Tong Chen as a Chief Investigator with CIRES!
Rocky is a lecturer in Business Analytics with the Data Science group at The University of Queensland. His research interests include data mining, machine learning, recommender systems, and predictive analytics.
He joined CIRES as an Affiliate Investigator in 2021, and was the Chair of the Centre’s inaugural Information Resilience PhD School in 2022. His Centre PhD supervisions span CIRES partners Health and Wellbeing Queensland, Allianz Partners (Australia) and the Queensland Police Service.
Rocky is looking forward to developing cutting-edge data science solutions to real-world, large-scale problems. He is also committed to the research training and capacity building that will add skillful hands to new-generation industry applications.
Welcome to New CIRES CI, Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski as a Chief Investigator with CIRES!
Wojtek is the Deputy Director (Research) and a Research Group Leader at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland. He joined the Centre as an Affiliate Investigator in 2022, and brings to CIRES specialist expertise in social sciences, including quantitative research methods and statistical analysis.
He has a strong research interest in the impact of disadvantage on educational and labour market outcomes in young people. He will be an Associate Advisor for the On-demand Dataset Builder https://lnkd.in/gf33trVD PhD project which is a collaboration with the Queensland Department of Education.
As a CI with the Centre, Wojtek is looking forward to building cross-disciplinary collaborations, and working with industry partners to promote building data resources and infrastructure to support evidence-based solutions to real-world challenges.
Welcome to PhD Researcher, Eslam Zaher
We’d like to welcome Eslam Zaher to CIRES! Eslam joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in April 2023 and is based at The University of Queensland. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Communications and Information Engineering from the Zewail City of Science and Technology. His research interests are focused on data-centric AI, interpretability, and natural language processing.
Eslam’s PhD project “Interpretable AI – Theory and Practice” is a collaboration with industry partner Max Kelsen, and is supervised by Dr Fred Roosta-Khorasani, Dr Quan Nguyen, and Dr Maciej Trzaskowski.
Welcome Eslam!
