Practicalism: Knowing and Agency. Australian philosophy has a deserved reputation for excellence, especially in topics of traditional centrality for analytic philosophers. But more still needs to be done within Australian epistemology. Most of the recent related work has occurred within the philosophies of mind, of language, and of science, and to some extent within ethics. That work needs to be complemented by good work in epistemology. I hope this project will help to achieve that, thereby inc ....Practicalism: Knowing and Agency. Australian philosophy has a deserved reputation for excellence, especially in topics of traditional centrality for analytic philosophers. But more still needs to be done within Australian epistemology. Most of the recent related work has occurred within the philosophies of mind, of language, and of science, and to some extent within ethics. That work needs to be complemented by good work in epistemology. I hope this project will help to achieve that, thereby increasing the national and international philosophical visibility of Australian epistemology.Read moreRead less
Automatic detection and modelling of acoustic markers of speech timing. This project aims to create new automatic sensing, analysis and assessment of cognitive, affective, mental and physical state from voice for mobile and computing devices. This project expects to generate new understanding of the effects of these states on detailed timing indicators of speech motor control, and new signal processing and machine learning methods that best exploit it. Expected outcomes from this project include ....Automatic detection and modelling of acoustic markers of speech timing. This project aims to create new automatic sensing, analysis and assessment of cognitive, affective, mental and physical state from voice for mobile and computing devices. This project expects to generate new understanding of the effects of these states on detailed timing indicators of speech motor control, and new signal processing and machine learning methods that best exploit it. Expected outcomes from this project include a new and accurate deep neural network framework for learning, analysing and detecting human states from speech automatically using articulatory timing markers. This should provide significant benefits, such as individually-tailored, frequent and low-cost automatic detection, monitoring and analytics for adverse states.Read moreRead less
Autonomy and Identity: A Relational Theory. Autonomy is widely regarded as an important value in liberal democratic societies and underpins many of the basic rights and legal protections enjoyed by citizens. The principle of respect for autonomy is a guiding ethical principle in a range of areas, including in medical and legal contexts, for example in requirements regarding informed consent, and in ethical guidelines governing protocols for research involving human subjects. A better understandi ....Autonomy and Identity: A Relational Theory. Autonomy is widely regarded as an important value in liberal democratic societies and underpins many of the basic rights and legal protections enjoyed by citizens. The principle of respect for autonomy is a guiding ethical principle in a range of areas, including in medical and legal contexts, for example in requirements regarding informed consent, and in ethical guidelines governing protocols for research involving human subjects. A better understanding of autonomy and its relationship to the social context has the potential to produce indirect socio-economic benefits by informing theory and practice in these and other areas. Read moreRead less
Innovative hands-free technology to give the severely disabled greater mobility control. Half of the serious neurological injuries in Australia result in tetraplegia. Combined with other disabilities that involve severe mobility impairments the cost to the community economically, psychologically and socially is huge. This new Australian technology will facilitate effective sharing of control between a disabled person and a computer control system, taking advantage of their unique strengths and e ....Innovative hands-free technology to give the severely disabled greater mobility control. Half of the serious neurological injuries in Australia result in tetraplegia. Combined with other disabilities that involve severe mobility impairments the cost to the community economically, psychologically and socially is huge. This new Australian technology will facilitate effective sharing of control between a disabled person and a computer control system, taking advantage of their unique strengths and enabling each to aid the other in areas of weakness. The social and personal benefits are potentially very large. Scope also exists to significantly reduce healthcare costs and to develop a new industry in hands-free technology.Read moreRead less
Trust and Distrust in Social Epistemic Networks. This project aims to discover critically-needed understandings of the social causes and consequences of ‘fake news’. It will do this by investigating and mapping the relationship between ‘epistemic vices’ and people’s acceptance of misinformation and disinformation (e.g. conspiracy theories). It will bring together approaches from experimental philosophy, natural language processing, social network analysis, and normative reflection to provide new ....Trust and Distrust in Social Epistemic Networks. This project aims to discover critically-needed understandings of the social causes and consequences of ‘fake news’. It will do this by investigating and mapping the relationship between ‘epistemic vices’ and people’s acceptance of misinformation and disinformation (e.g. conspiracy theories). It will bring together approaches from experimental philosophy, natural language processing, social network analysis, and normative reflection to provide new insights regarding distrust and intellectual vice, thus significantly advancing knowledge of the ‘dark side’ of social epistemology. Results will lead to urgently required guidance regarding the features of social networks that exacerbate or buffer against the manifestation of these vices.Read moreRead less
Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an ....Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an open-source tool that can capture precision correlations between deep code features and diverse vulnerabilities to pinpoint emerging vulnerabilities without the need for bug specifications. Significant benefits include greatly improved quality, reliability and security for modern software systems.Read moreRead less
The structure and function of self-representation. Recent psychology and neuroscience suggests that human beings are very bad at knowing themselves. This project changes that debate by arguing that our self-examination is not designed to increase self-knowledge, but to help us navigate the social world.
Point of view in personal memory: a philosophical study of perspective in remembering and imagining. Remembering the personal past is a key part of mental life, vital for identity and social sharing as well as for tracking the truth: but why do we sometimes remember past events from an external or 'observer' perspective, seeing ourselves in the remembered scene? This project in philosophy of mind develops a new theory of psychological perspective.
Adversarial Learning of Hybrid Representation. This project aims to design and implement a foundational deep representation learning framework for early detection, classification and defense of emerging malware by capturing their underlying behaviours via structured and unstructured heterogeneous information through hybrid representation learning, behaviour graph mining, and symbolic adversarial learning to discover and defend unknown malware families, thereby significantly boosting the accuracy ....Adversarial Learning of Hybrid Representation. This project aims to design and implement a foundational deep representation learning framework for early detection, classification and defense of emerging malware by capturing their underlying behaviours via structured and unstructured heterogeneous information through hybrid representation learning, behaviour graph mining, and symbolic adversarial learning to discover and defend unknown malware families, thereby significantly boosting the accuracy and robustness of existing classifiers and detectors. The resulting representation learning framework will enhance the national security to protect user privacy, reducing the multi-million-dollar loss caused by fraudulent transactions, and defending against cyber attacks.Read moreRead less
Mining large negative correlations for high-dimensional contrasting analysis. Negative correlations are widely embedded in real life applications, but in-depth research has rarely been conducted due to its high level of complexity. This project aims at efficient algorithms and frontier theory for finding large negative correlations, to enable smart information use in bioinformatics to promote Australia's leading role in data mining research.