Category: Centre News

Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq and colleague Thas Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas have authored this article in The Conversation to accompany the new report released today “Australia’s Digital Future a nation of users or leaders?.” The Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering have jointly issued an urgent call to action, asking the government and industry to recognise the importance of emerging digital technologies as a national science priority.

The report makes several key recommendations:

1. elevate emerging digital technologies as a national science and innovation priority
2. include research and innovation in emerging digital technologies in the 2021 Research Infrastructure Roadmap
3. recognise emerging digital technologies as an independent growth sector.

Read the full strategic plan here.

Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq was featured in this piece by The Brilliant looking at how data underlying algorithms is collected and the biases embedded in them. The way to disrupt this cycle of bias is information resilience, which means understanding how information is collected, and identifying all opportunities for bias to be introduced.

When Amazon developed an automated recruitment tool, the hope was that an unbiased, logical algorithm could read a CV and identify the best candidates. The algorithm turned out to be an engine of sexism, which was not only biased towards male resumes, but actively downgraded candidates if they came from one of two women’s universities in the USA. The problem was that the tool sought applicants whose CVs resembled previously successful job seekers; as most of these were men, the algorithm learned to reject women. It was stunning proof that algorithms are not neutral. They work according to the biases of the people who program them – a problem that computer scientist and Professor Shazia Sadiq is acutely conscious of.

Read the full feature article from The Brilliant here.

Congratulations to University of Queensland Researcher and Centre Chief Investigator Associate Professor Hongzhi Yin who has been awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship for the project “Decentralised Collaborative Predictive Analytics on Personal Smart Devices”. The 2021 ARC Future Fellowships scheme will see 100 new research projects funded at universities around Australia, focused on areas of national priority. Future Fellowships provide successful researchers with an opportunity to dedicate four years to their research endeavours in Australia. Hongzhi’s project will tackle the challenging problem of personalised predictive analytics with resource-constrained personal devices and massive-scale data.

See the full ARC media release here.

The top 5 capabilities all businesses need to build an information resilience plan

Recent industry reports identify ‘data gone wrong’ as the biggest risk factor for emerging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and autonomous decision making. However, with the right planning, a business can build information resilience to make embracing new technologies less risky, according to Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq. Read the full article in Momentum, The University of Queensland’s Business School magazine.