A unifying model for ion exchange membranes – towards a low carbon future. Polymeric ion exchange membranes are key to emerging renewable energy systems and bioprocessing applications. Advances in this field are currently impeded by a focus on their performance in idealised pure solutions and siloed research. This project aims to draw together fundamental and applied research to develop an innovative, unifying model for the transport of both charged ions and uncharged molecules through these mem ....A unifying model for ion exchange membranes – towards a low carbon future. Polymeric ion exchange membranes are key to emerging renewable energy systems and bioprocessing applications. Advances in this field are currently impeded by a focus on their performance in idealised pure solutions and siloed research. This project aims to draw together fundamental and applied research to develop an innovative, unifying model for the transport of both charged ions and uncharged molecules through these membranes within complex, multicomponent mixtures. The team will build on strong collaborations to drive uptake of the new model within the clean energy and CO2 reduction sectors to advance the abatement of Australian emissions; and will prepare young researchers for a role within these emerging fields.Read moreRead less
Transport of nucleotide sugars and their roles in cell wall biosynthesis. This project aims to define and manipulate transporters involved in the delivery of activated sugars for cell wall polymer biosynthesis. Cell wall polymers play important structural and functional roles in plants. They also represent an important renewable resource in the form of biomass and contribute to the nutritional value of food. The project will complete the characterisation of cell wall-associated transporters, app ....Transport of nucleotide sugars and their roles in cell wall biosynthesis. This project aims to define and manipulate transporters involved in the delivery of activated sugars for cell wall polymer biosynthesis. Cell wall polymers play important structural and functional roles in plants. They also represent an important renewable resource in the form of biomass and contribute to the nutritional value of food. The project will complete the characterisation of cell wall-associated transporters, apply new technologies to visualise cell wall biosynthesis in growing plants and leverage this knowledge to manipulate biomass in rice. This information will provide fundamental knowledge on a crucial process in plants that can be used the development of functional foods for agriculture and tailored biomass for industry.Read moreRead less
Probing microbial emulsions to break barriers to green oil production. This project aims to understand ultrasonic processing of concentrated slurries of oil-bearing yeast and algae. Humans must reduce their dependency on petroleum. While microorganisms can produce oils as replacement fuels and base chemicals, the processes for extracting these oils are inefficient. Ultrasound could improve oil recovery by replacing toxic solvents. Understanding the effects of ultrasound on microbial emulsions is ....Probing microbial emulsions to break barriers to green oil production. This project aims to understand ultrasonic processing of concentrated slurries of oil-bearing yeast and algae. Humans must reduce their dependency on petroleum. While microorganisms can produce oils as replacement fuels and base chemicals, the processes for extracting these oils are inefficient. Ultrasound could improve oil recovery by replacing toxic solvents. Understanding the effects of ultrasound on microbial emulsions is expected to develop solvent-free oil recovery processes that improve the economic and environmental benefits of microbial oil production. Such processes would greatly increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of producing microbial oils that can be used as green alternatives to petroleum fuels and chemicals.Read moreRead less
Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams. This project will contribute to the advancement of ICT innovation in Australia by developing a robust, reusable language understanding engine. The technology will be tailored to web applications, in the form of a conceptually-aware web search engine capable of tracking cross-document dialogues and identifying the core semantic thread of the dialogue. It will place Australia at the forefront of next-generation language technology developme ....Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams. This project will contribute to the advancement of ICT innovation in Australia by developing a robust, reusable language understanding engine. The technology will be tailored to web applications, in the form of a conceptually-aware web search engine capable of tracking cross-document dialogues and identifying the core semantic thread of the dialogue. It will place Australia at the forefront of next-generation language technology development, with applications in areas including concept-based multi-document summarisation and email surveillance.Read moreRead less
Fairness in Natural Language Processing. Natural language processing (NLP) has achieved spectacular commercial successes in recent years, and has been deployed across an ever-increasing breadth of devices and application areas. At the same time, there has been stark evidence to indicate that naively-trained models amplify biases in training data, and perform inconsistently across text relating to different demographic groupings of individuals. This project aims to systematically quantify the ext ....Fairness in Natural Language Processing. Natural language processing (NLP) has achieved spectacular commercial successes in recent years, and has been deployed across an ever-increasing breadth of devices and application areas. At the same time, there has been stark evidence to indicate that naively-trained models amplify biases in training data, and perform inconsistently across text relating to different demographic groupings of individuals. This project aims to systematically quantify the extent of such biases, and develop models that are both more socially equitable, as well as less prone to expose private data in the learned representations. In doing so, it will make NLP more accessible to new populations of users, and remove socio-technological barriers to NLP uptake.Read moreRead less
The Permeation of Water through Industrial Membrane Systems. This project aims to understand the permeation of water through commercially relevant non-porous polymeric membranes. Permeation, solubility and diffusivity will be studied in the vicinity of the glass transition temperature to elucidate the changes in free volume that occur through this transition. Non-linear concentration gradients due to anisotropic swelling will be probed using novel laminated membrane systems. Water clustering wil ....The Permeation of Water through Industrial Membrane Systems. This project aims to understand the permeation of water through commercially relevant non-porous polymeric membranes. Permeation, solubility and diffusivity will be studied in the vicinity of the glass transition temperature to elucidate the changes in free volume that occur through this transition. Non-linear concentration gradients due to anisotropic swelling will be probed using novel laminated membrane systems. Water clustering will be evaluated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance. Results are proposed to be used to build a new phenomenological model of water permeation that can be used directly by engineers in the design of industrial membrane systems.Read moreRead less
Discovering justified knowledge from data. Knowledge discovery from data has assumed a critical role in numerous areas of science, commerce and public administration. However, its effectiveness is limited by the undesirable propensity of current techniques to make many false, as well as real, discoveries. This research will rectify that problem, a critical outcome given the potential cost of making decisions or setting policy using flawed information. For example, it may prevent the adoption of ....Discovering justified knowledge from data. Knowledge discovery from data has assumed a critical role in numerous areas of science, commerce and public administration. However, its effectiveness is limited by the undesirable propensity of current techniques to make many false, as well as real, discoveries. This research will rectify that problem, a critical outcome given the potential cost of making decisions or setting policy using flawed information. For example, it may prevent the adoption of ineffective strategies for addressing land degradation; inappropriately targeted public health expenditure; expensive development and clinical trialing of drugs which prove ineffective; and wasted police and security investigations into unfounded suspicions of criminal or terrorist activity.Read moreRead less
Modelling and Removal of Noise and Artefacts in Surveillance and Security Video for Forensic Image Analysis and Enhancement. This project spearheads research in advanced digital image and video processing technology, placing Australia at the forefront of both theoretical and applied research to safeguard Australia. It tackles fundamental issues identified in our earlier research in this area and consulting work for Victoria and NSW Police Departments in forensic investigations since 2000. Althou ....Modelling and Removal of Noise and Artefacts in Surveillance and Security Video for Forensic Image Analysis and Enhancement. This project spearheads research in advanced digital image and video processing technology, placing Australia at the forefront of both theoretical and applied research to safeguard Australia. It tackles fundamental issues identified in our earlier research in this area and consulting work for Victoria and NSW Police Departments in forensic investigations since 2000. Although the main investigation focuses on video surveillance and security systems for public safety, policing, crime prevention and border control, the outcomes of the investigation will have other applications, including digital photography for fine-art, medical imaging, picture archiving and communication systems for telemedicine and rural healthcare systems.Read moreRead less
Query interpretation and response generation in large on-line resources. The unprecedented information explosion associated with the evolution of the Internet makes salient the challenge of providing users with answers to queries posed to Internet resources. The proposed project will apply machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty techniques to leverage the large amount of data found in the Internet in order to perform three tasks: (1) infer users' informational goals from their questions ....Query interpretation and response generation in large on-line resources. The unprecedented information explosion associated with the evolution of the Internet makes salient the challenge of providing users with answers to queries posed to Internet resources. The proposed project will apply machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty techniques to leverage the large amount of data found in the Internet in order to perform three tasks: (1) infer users' informational goals from their questions, (2) modify questions to improve the accuracy of retrieval engines, and (3) compose concise replies from the retrieved documents. The envisioned outcome of this project is a system that will generate replies to questions posed to on-line resources.Read moreRead less
A Minimum Message Length Approach for Discourse Interpretation. The ability to communicate with computer systems in Natural Language has great potential to improve the overall experience for users. However, current systems support only limited means of communication. In this project, we propose to investigate the application of model-selection techniques for interpreting human discourse. In particular, we will consider situations where the computer interprets users' discourse in the context of i ....A Minimum Message Length Approach for Discourse Interpretation. The ability to communicate with computer systems in Natural Language has great potential to improve the overall experience for users. However, current systems support only limited means of communication. In this project, we propose to investigate the application of model-selection techniques for interpreting human discourse. In particular, we will consider situations where the computer interprets users' discourse in the context of its own knowledge. The versatility of our approach will be demonstrated by using it to (1) interpret discourse in a human-computer dialogue, (2) provide feedback to short essays, and (3) determine the impact of a document on a model.Read moreRead less