Making human place knowledge digestible by computers. This project aims to develop the tools that will enable people to interact intuitively with computers about places and the relations between places. People understand their environment in a different way to computers; they think of places and their relations, while computers use coordinates and maps. People’s interaction with maps is cognitively costly and error-prone, which is becoming untenable in situations needing time-critical decision m ....Making human place knowledge digestible by computers. This project aims to develop the tools that will enable people to interact intuitively with computers about places and the relations between places. People understand their environment in a different way to computers; they think of places and their relations, while computers use coordinates and maps. People’s interaction with maps is cognitively costly and error-prone, which is becoming untenable in situations needing time-critical decision making. The project will revolutionise the design of information services where computers deal with humans and location in time-critical or stressful situations, including emergency calls, disaster response and local search queries. The uptake of this design by industry will lead to economic benefits as well as a safer society living in a smarter environment.Read moreRead less
Evaluating recurrence as a measure of change in interpersonal dynamics. This project aims to develop an automated conversation analysis system to quantify how communication changes over extended periods of time. It is innovative in proposing to extend the theory and methods of recurrence analysis (a dynamical systems technique) to interacting modalities combining text, audio and video, and to longitudinal analyses. The project is significant in being the first to aim to measure communication dyn ....Evaluating recurrence as a measure of change in interpersonal dynamics. This project aims to develop an automated conversation analysis system to quantify how communication changes over extended periods of time. It is innovative in proposing to extend the theory and methods of recurrence analysis (a dynamical systems technique) to interacting modalities combining text, audio and video, and to longitudinal analyses. The project is significant in being the first to aim to measure communication dynamics over time in the fields of education, health, public discourse and science. It is expected to result in new theories and methods for recurrence analysis validated using real-world data; and to enable new technologies for evaluating professional communication training and communication changes resulting from education or disease progression.Read moreRead less
Attention please! Selective attention and human associative learning. Selective attention allows us to pick useful pieces of information out of the mass of stimulation that we're faced with every moment. This project investigates how what we've previously learnt about the significance of events influences whether we'll pick them out as useful in future, and how this might be impaired by old age or mental disorder.
Learning the complexity of scientific knowledge about climate change with computer modelling and visualization technologies. This project provides benefits to the national priorities of a environmentally sustainable Australia; and frontier technologies for building and transforming Australian industries. The project helpins students in Australia more deeply understand the sciences that underlie environmental sustainability. Learning with modelling and visualization technologies will help student ....Learning the complexity of scientific knowledge about climate change with computer modelling and visualization technologies. This project provides benefits to the national priorities of a environmentally sustainable Australia; and frontier technologies for building and transforming Australian industries. The project helpins students in Australia more deeply understand the sciences that underlie environmental sustainability. Learning with modelling and visualization technologies will help students learn important scientific knowledge and prepare them for the use of frontier technologies that are becoming infused into the practices of scientists and professionals in many fields. This project also directly contributes to the national Digital Education Revolution initiative.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120102378
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
What shapes the structure of language? An experimental and computational investigation. How do people learn language so easily, and how is the structure of language shaped by our learning biases? This project attempts to answer these questions through an innovative combination of experimental and computational tools, with implications for technological development as well as educational interventions for both children and adults.
Incremental syntactic parsing and coreference resolution. As computers become smaller, keyboards and screens become increasingly impractical. We'd like to be able to talk to our computers, but they'd have to understand what we say. This project will develop a computational model that tracks which things are talked about and identifies 'who did what to whom' in text or speech.
Computational models of synergies in human language acquisition. How do children learn language? Do they first learn to recognise words and then associate words with meanings, or do they use the meanings to figure out what the words are, or do they do both at the same time, and if so, how? This project will investigate questions like these using advanced computational models of the way children learn from their environment.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120100898
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
The brain that adapts itself - flexible processing in an ever-changing world. To cope with the changing world around us, our brains must constantly adapt themselves, reconfiguring an incredibly complex system to produce flexible behaviour. This project will develop innovative brain imaging techniques and use them to examine this process in vision, fundamental for understanding the human brain, and advancing neuroscience in Australia.
The role of relational information in the guidance of visual attention. The project aims to develop a new theory of attention that describes more accurately which items in the visual field can pop out and grab attention. The potential practical gains of the project are high, as it can lead to significant advancements in robotic vision, transport safety, and provide insights into clinical disorders such as ADHD.
Solving the inert knowledge problem. A central goal of education is for students to transfer what they learn to new contexts or problems. Indeed, expert reasoning is often characterised by seeing the deep structural commonalities across seemingly disparate situations. However, the knowledge students acquire is notoriously inert, tied to the specifics of the learning examples. This project aims to move towards solving 'the inert knowledge problem' by investigating how humans learn concepts define ....Solving the inert knowledge problem. A central goal of education is for students to transfer what they learn to new contexts or problems. Indeed, expert reasoning is often characterised by seeing the deep structural commonalities across seemingly disparate situations. However, the knowledge students acquire is notoriously inert, tied to the specifics of the learning examples. This project aims to move towards solving 'the inert knowledge problem' by investigating how humans learn concepts defined by abstract relational structure, and by designing educational applications that enhance the use of relational learning mechanisms in students with a wide range of cognitive abilities.Read moreRead less