Inequality, Trade, and Technology. This project aims to improve our understanding of the causes of rising income inequality in the world economy and in Australia since the early 1980s. We focus on the increasing building costs and imports of machinery as significant contributors to the increasing inequality. We hypothesize 1) that the increasing costs of buildings have reduced the demand for workers that are complementary to non-residential building capital; thus, reducing real wages; and 2) tha ....Inequality, Trade, and Technology. This project aims to improve our understanding of the causes of rising income inequality in the world economy and in Australia since the early 1980s. We focus on the increasing building costs and imports of machinery as significant contributors to the increasing inequality. We hypothesize 1) that the increasing costs of buildings have reduced the demand for workers that are complementary to non-residential building capital; thus, reducing real wages; and 2) that the marked increase in imports of machinery since the 1960s has reduced the demand for unskilled labour and widened the employment and wage gap between skilled and unskilled labour. Both factors may have driven the increasing inequality in Australia.
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Defense against adversarial attacks on deep learning in computer vision. Computer vision applications rely heavily on deep learning, which is highly vulnerable to being fooled by adding subtle perturbations to object/image textures that are imperceptible to humans. This project aims to develop defense mechanisms to detect and remove adversarial patterns from the input images. The project expects to advance knowledge in understanding the vulnerabilities of deep learning, and to design deep learni ....Defense against adversarial attacks on deep learning in computer vision. Computer vision applications rely heavily on deep learning, which is highly vulnerable to being fooled by adding subtle perturbations to object/image textures that are imperceptible to humans. This project aims to develop defense mechanisms to detect and remove adversarial patterns from the input images. The project expects to advance knowledge in understanding the vulnerabilities of deep learning, and to design deep learning architectures that are inherently robust. The outcomes of this project will increase the security and reliability of computer vision by detecting, reporting and nullifying such attacks and will benefit the general public and industry on many fronts.Read moreRead less
TSuNAMi: Time Series Network Animal Modelling. Our proposal is motivated by and based upon the successful representation of time series as a network (or graph). We construct an abstract representation of a system from measurements of its changing behaviour over time. Properties of that structure (the network) then allow us to infer diagnostic information of the system. Specifically, we propose to apply this to livestock welfare during transport. By measuring the biological and environment condi ....TSuNAMi: Time Series Network Animal Modelling. Our proposal is motivated by and based upon the successful representation of time series as a network (or graph). We construct an abstract representation of a system from measurements of its changing behaviour over time. Properties of that structure (the network) then allow us to infer diagnostic information of the system. Specifically, we propose to apply this to livestock welfare during transport. By measuring the biological and environment condition of the animal we construct a network representation of that system. Geometric features of that network can then be used to infer health or duress of the subject. This proposal will develop the generic mathematical machinery to connect geometric features of the network with system behaviour. Read moreRead less
Equitable funding for health care: integrating social outcomes. This project will develop an innovative method for decision makers to achieve more equitable allocation of scarce health care resources. Health programs and treatments affect not just health (survival & health related quality of life) but also broader aspects of well-being (e.g. dignity, autonomy, safety). Our current methods for evaluating value for money in health do not capture these aspects. The project will provide benefit by a ....Equitable funding for health care: integrating social outcomes. This project will develop an innovative method for decision makers to achieve more equitable allocation of scarce health care resources. Health programs and treatments affect not just health (survival & health related quality of life) but also broader aspects of well-being (e.g. dignity, autonomy, safety). Our current methods for evaluating value for money in health do not capture these aspects. The project will provide benefit by allowing health system decision makers to achieve fairer allocation of resources across diverse health conditions, interventions and patient populations. Expected outcomes include a new tool for assessing interventions and measuring population health incorporating both health and social outcomes. Read moreRead less
Child Dental Benefit Policies and the Health of Australian Children. This project aims to examine the early effects of two recent initiatives by the Australian government to improve children’s dental health by providing funds to cover essential dental services for children from disadvantaged families. It explores the factors affecting eligible children’s access to benefits from these initiatives and identifies the causal impacts of these changed health care financing arrangements on children’s c ....Child Dental Benefit Policies and the Health of Australian Children. This project aims to examine the early effects of two recent initiatives by the Australian government to improve children’s dental health by providing funds to cover essential dental services for children from disadvantaged families. It explores the factors affecting eligible children’s access to benefits from these initiatives and identifies the causal impacts of these changed health care financing arrangements on children’s consumption of dental services, indicators of oral health and general health, and other indicators of cognitive and non-cognitive development. Using advanced econometric techniques and panel datasets, this project is expected to contribute to the development of effective policies for promoting health and wellbeing.Read moreRead less
“Beacons in the Night” unveiling how galaxies light up dark matter. How dark matter influences the formation and evolution of galaxies is to this day an outstanding question in astrophysics. To answer it, world-class facilities and a unique combination of observations and theory are required. This DP team, a world-class team of observers and theorists, will tackle this question by leveraging on two multi-million dollar projects: the MAGPI galaxy survey and the hydrodynamical simulations suite EA ....“Beacons in the Night” unveiling how galaxies light up dark matter. How dark matter influences the formation and evolution of galaxies is to this day an outstanding question in astrophysics. To answer it, world-class facilities and a unique combination of observations and theory are required. This DP team, a world-class team of observers and theorists, will tackle this question by leveraging on two multi-million dollar projects: the MAGPI galaxy survey and the hydrodynamical simulations suite EAGLE-XL. MAGPI will deliver exquisite kinematics for hundreds of galaxies in the middle ages of the Universe, providing a view to the effect of dark matter on galaxies at this critical time, while EAGLE-XL represents the technological frontier in simulations and provides the best interpretative framework for MAGPI.Read moreRead less
Using immersive virtual reality to enhance students’ science visualisation. This project aims to investigate the potential of advanced visualisation technology, immersive virtual reality, as a collaborative learning environment to support students to explore their ideas and learn a core chemistry concept, molecular structures and functions. Incorporating both data analytics and qualitative video analysis, the project will establish a deep understanding of how students learn about the molecular w ....Using immersive virtual reality to enhance students’ science visualisation. This project aims to investigate the potential of advanced visualisation technology, immersive virtual reality, as a collaborative learning environment to support students to explore their ideas and learn a core chemistry concept, molecular structures and functions. Incorporating both data analytics and qualitative video analysis, the project will establish a deep understanding of how students learn about the molecular world within an immersive virtual reality environment in relation to the learners’ experience, chemistry content, visual representations, learning tasks, and design features. The project will recommend evidence-driven design considerations for learning resources development and further educational research with advanced technologies.Read moreRead less
Benefits and costs of non-market valuation for environmental management. Benefits from environmental policies are often unpriced “non-market values” (NMVs). Environmental agencies struggle to know how best to measure these relatively intangible benefits, but doing so is important to ensure value for money from public investments. Environmental economists have developed and applied a wide range of methods for estimating NMVs. The methods vary in their comprehensiveness, accuracy and cost. Yet no ....Benefits and costs of non-market valuation for environmental management. Benefits from environmental policies are often unpriced “non-market values” (NMVs). Environmental agencies struggle to know how best to measure these relatively intangible benefits, but doing so is important to ensure value for money from public investments. Environmental economists have developed and applied a wide range of methods for estimating NMVs. The methods vary in their comprehensiveness, accuracy and cost. Yet no rigorous tool is available to assess (a) which NMV method is best to implement, accounting for its cost and its potential to improve decisions, or (b) whether any NMV method improves decisions enough to warrant its cost. In creating such a tool, this project will deliver a key breakthrough in environmental economics.Read moreRead less
Fine-grained Human Action Recognition with Deep Graph Neural Networks. This project aims to develop novel graph neural network based deep learning algorithms for fine-grained human action recognition. This project expects to bring human action analysis to the next level and to significantly advance the analysis of subtle yet complex human actions. Expected outcomes of this project include theoretical advances on graph representation based deep learning algorithms for spatial-temporal data, and e ....Fine-grained Human Action Recognition with Deep Graph Neural Networks. This project aims to develop novel graph neural network based deep learning algorithms for fine-grained human action recognition. This project expects to bring human action analysis to the next level and to significantly advance the analysis of subtle yet complex human actions. Expected outcomes of this project include theoretical advances on graph representation based deep learning algorithms for spatial-temporal data, and enabling techniques for more objective human action analysis in many domains such as sports and health. This should provide significant benefits to any application domain involving big and complex spatial-temporal data for finer analytics and better knowledge discovery.Read moreRead less
Culturally inclusive language assessments for Indigenous Aboriginal students. This project aims to improve the literacy outcomes for Aboriginal students. It focuses on the assessment of oral language, the foundation for written literacy skills, and the mode of communication most common for this student cohort. The project will collect school-based oral language data from rural and remote educational sites and use it to develop supplementary assessment tools for multilingual education. The assess ....Culturally inclusive language assessments for Indigenous Aboriginal students. This project aims to improve the literacy outcomes for Aboriginal students. It focuses on the assessment of oral language, the foundation for written literacy skills, and the mode of communication most common for this student cohort. The project will collect school-based oral language data from rural and remote educational sites and use it to develop supplementary assessment tools for multilingual education. The assessment tools will be validated in workshops with teachers and expanded with descriptors for assessing Aboriginal students’ communicative competence. The project aims to improve educational outcomes for rural and remote Aboriginal students.Read moreRead less