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
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
Adaptive Vector Filters for the Restoration of Digital Colour Images. Colour image restoration has very important applications in colour cameras, robotic navigation, video security systems, multimedia communications, and digital TV broadcast. Conventional vector filters have difficulty in simultaneously achieving three major objectives: noise suppression, detail preservation, and chromaticity retention. This project aims at formulating and evaluating novel adaptive filters to accomplish the th ....Adaptive Vector Filters for the Restoration of Digital Colour Images. Colour image restoration has very important applications in colour cameras, robotic navigation, video security systems, multimedia communications, and digital TV broadcast. Conventional vector filters have difficulty in simultaneously achieving three major objectives: noise suppression, detail preservation, and chromaticity retention. This project aims at formulating and evaluating novel adaptive filters to accomplish the three objectives simultaneously. Theoretical basis will be investigated for devising different adaptive filters to restore colour images and video sequences contaminated by various types of noise. The new filters will provide significant improvement over exiting techniques, yielding better tools and packages for colour image processing and restoration applications.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
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
Towards realistic verbal interactions between people and computers-a probabilistic approach. This project aims to facilitate natural spoken interactions between people and computer systems, addressing obstacles to the acceptance of these systems. We will investigate computational models for relevant aspects of spoken dialogue, which will be implemented in computer systems for diverse tasks (for example, home devices and phone-enabled services).
Low-complexity Video Coding for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks. This project develops frontier technologies to capture and transmit videos by miniaturised sensing devices. It will improve Australia's telemetric surveillance capabilities and benefit defence, law enforcement, traffic control, and wildlife inhabitant monitoring agencies. It will enable the telecommunication industry to support quality video conferencing with mobile phones and the computer games industry to develop rich virtua ....Low-complexity Video Coding for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks. This project develops frontier technologies to capture and transmit videos by miniaturised sensing devices. It will improve Australia's telemetric surveillance capabilities and benefit defence, law enforcement, traffic control, and wildlife inhabitant monitoring agencies. It will enable the telecommunication industry to support quality video conferencing with mobile phones and the computer games industry to develop rich virtual reality games. The Australian health industry will be able to provide ubiquitous healthcare services through improved telemedicine and medical imaging with emerging technologies such as edible cameras. The project will also enable Australia to lead the world in setting up video coding standards for sensor networks.Read moreRead less
Developing Reliable Bio-Crypto Features for Mobile Template Protection. Cost of identity theft crimes were at multi-million dollars in Australia in 2007. Technically this is due to the fact that conventional personal identification number and token based security mechanisms cannot identify genuine users. Biometric fingerprint security systems emerge as a promising solution. However protection of the mobile embedded fingerprint template itself is an unresolved problem. The project aims to devel ....Developing Reliable Bio-Crypto Features for Mobile Template Protection. Cost of identity theft crimes were at multi-million dollars in Australia in 2007. Technically this is due to the fact that conventional personal identification number and token based security mechanisms cannot identify genuine users. Biometric fingerprint security systems emerge as a promising solution. However protection of the mobile embedded fingerprint template itself is an unresolved problem. The project aims to develop new ways designing bio-cryptosystems that provide strong security strength. The project will bring new body of knowledge into this field and place Australia in the forefront of this research, and also result in strengthened security of IT infrastructure and systems for industries.Read moreRead less