Category: Awards

CIRES Chief Investigator Hassan Khosravi and the RiPPLE team have been named a finalist for the Queensland AI Research Project of the Year at the Queensland AI Awards 2024 for their project RiPPLE: Harnessing student wisdom to improve learning.

A huge thank you to The University of Queensland, UQ Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI) & UniQuest for their unwavering support, and to Queensland AI Hub for this incredible recognition.

RiPPLE represents a pioneering approach in the education sector where we believe that every student has the potential to create impactful waves in the ocean of knowledge. Instead of being passive recipients of content, we want to empower students to spread their wisdom, contribute to knowledge creation and transform their learning into an active social and personalized learning experience. It uniquely integrates the principles of co-creation with advanced AI technologies to enable educators to partner with students to develop a peer-reviewed repository of study resources. These resources are then used to engage individual students with personalized instruction tailored to their specific learning needs.

For more details on the platform, check out this video. We’re excited to start supporting pilot trials of RiPPLE in both schools and higher education.

A team of four EECS undergraduate students from BCompSci and BEng(Hons) won first prize in the International AI Hackathon. The hackathon was held in Bangkok from July 24 to 27. They created a flood prediction application that was 75% more accurate than Google’s flood forecasting, based on the historical data that they used. Representatives of the Thai government expressed interest in supporting the team to continue their work on the project.

The team received funding support from CIRES to travel to Bangkok to participate in the hackathon and CIRES also provided the team with pre-trip training on information resilience.

At the hackathon, Aneesha Bakharia from EECS provided a full-day training workshop on developing software that uses LLMs delivered to all hackathon participants. The hackathon was jointly organised by EECS, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, and the Thai National Innovation Agency. It was supported by AWS, AMD, and Digital Focus.

Congratulations to First Prize Winners: Pritika Guglani, Abdallah Azazy, Bailey Stoodley, and Sidney Neil

A team led by CIRES CI, Prof Hongzhi Yin, has been selected as a finalist by the iAward judging panel for their entry “Personalized On-Device Large Language Models” in the category of Technology Platforms.  Hongzhi and PhD student, Liang Qu have been invited to the Queensland State iAwards Ceremony , a celebration of innovations in the tech sector, to determine the winners of the nominated categories. Here is a great video where you can learn about the project (spoiler: you can use large language models on your phone offline!)

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.

• Professor Hongzhi Yin
• Associate Professor Sen Wang
• Senior Lecturer Rocky Chen

A huge congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator and Associate Professor Yin Hongzhi for being a finalist in Queensland’s 2023 Young Tall Poppy Awards! Hongzhi was nominated for his research to return control of AI and its reliance on data to users. The award ceremony was held in Brisbane on the 18th October 2023.

Privacy and AI domination are significant challenges that humankind faces in the context of big data and AI, and AI’s reliance on data has led to the empowerment of tech giants and reshaping the global order. Hongzhi has developed a new decentralised intelligent computing model that collaboratively processes and analyses data on connected personal devices, providing real-time intelligent services without relying on a central controller.

Held annually around Australia, in Queensland the Young Tall Poppy Science Awards are hosted by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science in partnership with the Office of the Queensland Chief Scientist. The awards recognise and celebrate researchers who demonstrate scientific excellence combined with a unique passion for science communication, which can inspire young people to enter STEM study and careers.

Read the full media release here