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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
We’d like to welcome Van Nhat Huy Nguyen (Huy) to CIRES! Huy has joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in April 2023 and is based at The University of Queensland. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) from UQ, receiving First Class Honours. His dissertation was on detecting misinformation from multiple news topics, and his research interests include natural language processing and data linkage.
Huy’s PhD project “Expanding Data Sets to Allow Improved Critical Care for Children – Inpatient Risk Prediction” is a collaboration with government partner Queensland Health, and is supervised by Dr. Sen Wang and Dr. Ruihong Qiu, and Associate Professor Kristen Gibbons and Dr. Sainath Raman (Queensland Health). His research focuses on developing inpatient risk prediction models for paediatric patients at risk of sepsis. He is inspired by the Centre’s vision to solve real-world problems, using a diverse range of expertise and technologies. He is also looking forward to collaborating with colleagues across the Centre and with Queensland Health to improve the quality of children’s healthcare.
Welcome Huy!
CIRES Postdoctoral researcher, Dr Junliang Yu, and CIRES CIs, Dr Rocky Chen and A/Prof Hongzhi Yin, presented a tutorial on Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation: Foundations, Methods and Prospects at 28th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2023), April 17-20, 2023, Tianjin, China.
Recommender systems have become a necessity in this Internet era to offer personalization. However, in contrast to the increasing ease of model building and deployment, the lack of user behavioral data still remains a major pain point for modern recommender systems that constantly compromises recommendation performance. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL), which can enable training on massive unlabeled data with automatic data annotation, has achieved tremendous success in many fields and been applied to an ever-expanding range of applications including recommendation. Many recent studies have demonstrated that all kinds of recommendation models can be significantly improved through learning with well-designed self-supervised tasks and data augmentations. In this tutorial, we will provide a panorama of the research efforts on self-supervised recommendation. Specifically, the content includes: (1) foundations and overview of self-supervised recommendation; (2) a comprehensive taxonomy of existing self-supervised recommendation methods; (3) how to apply SSL to various recommendation scenarios; (4) Challenges and future research directions.
Speakers Bio
Junliang Yu is a postdoctoral research fellow in the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at The University of Queensland. His research interests include recommender systems, social media analytics, deep learning on graphs, and self-supervised learning. He has 10+ publications on top-tier international venues such as KDD, WWW, ICDM, CIKM, AAAI, SIGIR, VLDBJ, and TKDE. He has been actively providing professional services to many toptier conferences/journals such as AAAI, CIKM, IJCAI, etc. He has rich lecture experience and tutored one relevant course of social media analytics, and also has made oral presentations on multiple top-tier conferences.
Dr. Tong Chen is a lecturer with the Data Science Discipline at The University of Queensland. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from The University of Queensland in 2020. Dr. Chen’s research interests include data mining, machine learning, business intelligence, recommender systems, and predictive analytics. He has 60+ publications on top-tier international venues such as KDD, SIGIR, ICDE, AAAI, IJCAI, ICDM, WWW, TKDE, IJCAI, TOIS, and CIKM. He has been actively providing professional services to over 20 world-leading international conferences/journals in the fields of data mining, information retrieval and AI. Dr. Chen has ample track records in lecturing, witnessed by his course design and delivery experience in business analytics, full-course teaching experience in social media analytics and database systems, as well as invited talks on cutting-edge recommender systems at the WWW’22 Tutorial, ICDM’20 NeuRec Workshop, Beihang University, and Zhejiang University.
Dr. Hongzhi Yin works as ARC Future Fellow and associate professor with The University of Queensland, Australia. He received his doctoral degree from Peking University in July 2014. His current main research interests include recommender systems, graph embedding and mining, chatbots, social media analytics and mining, edge machine learning, trustworthy machine learning, decentralized and federated learning, and smart healthcare. He has published 220+ papers with Hindex 52, including 22 most highly cited publications in Top 1% (CNCI) venues such as KDD, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, AAAI, TKDE,etc. He has won 6 Best Paper Awards such as Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, Best Student Paper Award at DASFAA 2020, and Best Paper Award Nomination at ICDM 2018. Dr. Yin has rich lecture experience and taught 5 relevant courses such as information retrieval and web search, data mining, social media analytics, and responsible data science. He was nominated as Most Effective Teacher of EAIT Faculty in The University of Queensland for 2020, 2021 and 2022. He has delivered 12 keynotes, invited talks and tutorials at the top international conferences such as tutorials at WWW 2017, KDD 2017 and WWW 2022.
Welcome to Dr Lei Han who joins CIRES as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland.
Lei joined the Centre in April 2023 and his passion lies in developing innovative solutions in the field of Data Science, with a particular interest in Crowdsourcing and Human Computation. He received his PhD from The University of Queensland in 2021, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at School of ITEE before joining CIRES. He will work closely with Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini and Professor Shazia Sadiq.
Lei is excited about the prospect of collaborating with colleagues who possess diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise across the Centre. He believes that such collaborations have the potential to drive valuable advances in Human-in-the-loop Artificial Intelligence. By working together, sharing knowledge and resources, and leveraging different perspectives, he is confident that they can develop innovative solutions to complex problems and make significant contributions to the field.
Welcome Lei!
We’d like to welcome Jorge Retamales to CIRES! Jorge has joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in April 2023 and is based at The University of Queensland. He holds a Masters Degree in Information Management from the University of Washington. He has extensive working experience in Analytics, with his previous role as Head of Statistics for JUNJI in Chile, a government department in the early education sector. Jorge’s PhD project “Developing Analytics-Driven Organisations” is a collaboration with business partner Aginic and supervised by Dr. Ida Asadi Someh, Professor Marta Indulska, and Emma Freya (Aginic).
He is excited about helping organizations effectively use their data products and capabilities for value creation, through collaborating with colleagues and CIRES industry partners.
Welcome Jorge!
Value Measurement of Data Products
Full details and how to apply
Another excellent PhD scholarship opportunity at The University of Queensland! Applications are now open for our Value Measurement of Data Products project, working with Dr Rocky Tong Chen, Dr Wen Hua, Professor Shazia Sadiq, Shane Downey MPhil, and Charon Abbott in collaboration with our industry partner Allianz Partners.
This project will challenge and extend the current body of knowledge on value of data products including computation, human effort and perceived value, and deliver a domain-agnostic framework that will build business capacity on informing and prioritising data science projects.
We are looking for someone with a good understanding of concepts from data science, business process, applied statistics, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning. This project also requires proficiency in Python programming language and machine learning software packages, as well as experience in data processing and data analysis.
You’ll gain real-world experience during your PhD and undertake the equivalent of a 12-month placement with Allianz.
Applications close 21st June 2023.
For full details and how to apply: https://lnkd.in/gMdt33WS
In collaboration with global insurance company, Allianz Worldwide Partners (AWP) Australia, this project will challenge and extend the current body of knowledge on value of data products including computation, human effort and perceived value, and deliver a domain-agnostic framework that will build business capacity on informing and prioritising data science projects. This project focuses on how to maximise data-driven value creation and capture and is one of two CIRES projects with AWP Australia related to organisational and transformational aspects of data, algorithms, and AI.
For this position, the successful candidate is expected to have a good understanding of concepts from data science, business process, applied statistics, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning. This project also requires proficiency in Python programming language and machine learning software packages, as well as experience in data processing and data analysis.
About the scholarship
We’d like to welcome Hongliang Ni to CIRES! Hongliang is a PhD researcher based The University of Queensland. Her PhD project “Bias Mitigation in Human in the Loop Decision Systems” is a collaboration with CIRES partner Queensland Police Service, and supervised by Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini, Professor Shazia Sadiq, and Nick Moss (Queensland Police Service). Hongliang’s research interests include human-in-the-loop methods and graph neural networks.
Welcome Hongliang!
This project will develop a prototype system to showcase the scalability, reliability, and usability of an AI-assisted dataset builder for effective and efficient discovery and curation of multi-source and multi-modal educational data. Working in close collaboration with domain experts and end users from the Queensland Department of Education, the project team will review and investigate best practices for constructing on-demand data sets and the concept of “data as a service”. The project will also develop new methods for AI-assisted on-demand dataset builder and will evaluate with a human-centred lens. The research will result in validated methods and a prototype implementation of the system, road-tested with end users.
The advisory team for this project is Associate Professor Hassan Khosravi (Principal Advisor), Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski, Professor Shazia Sadiq (Associate Advisors), and Dr Angela Ferguson (Queensland Department of Education).
For this position, CIRES is seeking a candidate with a good background in data science, data analytics, or machine learning; and proficiency in python programming language and machine learning software packages such as Pytorch. Track record of publishing high-quality conference or journal paper and experience working with and ingesting structured and unstructured date from multiple sources are desirable.
About the scholarship
Applications close 16th May 2023.
For full details and how to apply: https://lnkd.in/gD4npFr4
We’d like to welcome Hrishi Patel to CIRES! Hrishi is a PhD researcher based at The University of Queensland. He will be working on the “Expanding Data Sets to Allow Improved Critical Care for Children – Outpatient Risk Prediction” in collaboration with our government partner Queensland Health, partner investigator Dr Adam Irwin, Dr Sen Wang, and Professor Shazia Sadiq.
Hrishi has a Masters of Data Science from UQ, and a keen interest in machine learning, learning analytics, and data science teaching. Welcome Hrishi!
We’d like to welcome Pa Pa Khin to CIRES! Pa Pa is a PhD researcher based at Swinburne University of Technology. Her PhD project “Curating Systems of Engagement” is a collaboration with partner Astral Consulting, and supervised by Dr Paul Scifleet, Associate Professor Amir Aryani, and Marie Felsbourg (Astral Consulting). Pa Pa’s research interests include Enterprise Information Management, Systems of Engagement, and Knowledge Management Systems.
Welcome Pa Pa!
We are recruiting for a Level A postdoc fellow to join us in the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at The University of Queensland in sunny Brisbane, Australia. International candidates are also welcome to apply as Visa sponsorship may be available for this appointment.
As a key member of the team, you will have the opportunity to conduct innovative and reproducible research related to responsible use of data and human-centred Artificial Intelligence. You will also have the chance to supervise and develop research students, cultivate external partnerships, and contribute to the wider academic community.
This position will involve working closely with Associate Professor Hassan Khosravi, and other Centre researchers working on topics related to responsible use of data.
We are seeking a candidate with:
This position will be based in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at UQ, and working across multiple projects with industry and government partners, providing a wealth of experience in multi-disciplinary teams, research planning, and industry and public sector dynamics. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work directly with the Centre’s partners, with an expected third of their time dedicated to working with partner organisations.
Applications close Monday 8th May 2023 at 11pm AEST.
This scheme will support high calibre research students for 8-12 weeks term visits to the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at The University of Queensland, and provides the opportunity to conduct joint research work on areas of mutual interest.
Successful applicants will be provided with a lump-sum to partially cover living costs in and return airfares to Brisbane.
Application Deadlines for 2023
March 22, 2023, 23:59, Anywhere on Earth.
June 22, 2023, 223:59, Anywhere on Earth.
September 22, 2023, 23:59, Anywhere on Earth.
Eligibility
1. The scheme is primarily intended for PhD students (who have already passed their Qualification Exam at their respective university). We may also accept Master’s/Bachelor students who can demonstrate strong research & development expertise to the assessment panel.
2. Your main research expertise should generally fit in the area of data science and in particular should align with the research specialisations of the CIRES centre investigators at UQ (https://cires.org.au/people/) as well as with the interests of centre industry and government partners (see current projects https://cires.org.au/research/projects/).
3. Partial co-funding from your own institution.
4. CIRES will offer funding of:
Application materials
To apply, please provide the following, sent as one PDF file to the contact address (below).
Review process
The Centre’s review panel will consider applications and aim to provide a decision within 14 business days (unless specified otherwise) following the application deadline.
Contact details
All information should be sent in an email with the subject “CIRES Visiting Student Scheme” to cires@uq.edu.au, copied to the proposed UQ-based
collaborator and your current supervisor.
If you have any questions about the scheme, please contact the Centre via cires@uq.edu.au
On 5 March, CIRES CI, A/Prof Gianluca Demartini spoke with Spencer Howson at Radio 4BC about the work CIRES is undertaking on social media platform algorithms and how harmful online content and fake news should be managed.
CIRES Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq was featured in the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering’s (ATSE) Fellow Friday series. In this piece, “Preparing for the future of AI” Shazia outlines three priorities that will enable us at an individual and societal level, to fully harness the potential of generative AI. These are: Training for quality; Addressing the skills shortage; and Making AI accessible. Read the full feature here.
Congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator and Theme Leader Associate Professor Hassan Khosravi and The RiPPLE Team, for their Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, which was recognised at the recent AAUT awards!
The team designed and implemented, an innovative adaptive educational system that transforms student learning into an active, social and personalised experience.
Three other UQ teachers were recognised, meaning UQ remains the most awarded university through the AAUT scheme. Read more: http://bit.ly/3IPlCvS
