Development Of The Quick Clinical On-line Evidence Based Decision Support System
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$124,500.00
Summary
Web information retrieval is of increasing importance to health professions. Yet, despite advances in technology, clinicians still have large unmet information needs with significant consequences for the public. QuickClinical is an evidence delivery system that utilises intelligent search filter technology to assist typical clinical tasks like ‘diagnosis’, ensuring only the most relevant evidence is retrieved. This grant will allow a research prototype to be taken to early commercialisation stag ....Web information retrieval is of increasing importance to health professions. Yet, despite advances in technology, clinicians still have large unmet information needs with significant consequences for the public. QuickClinical is an evidence delivery system that utilises intelligent search filter technology to assist typical clinical tasks like ‘diagnosis’, ensuring only the most relevant evidence is retrieved. This grant will allow a research prototype to be taken to early commercialisation stage, ready to be deployed in different environments for different clinical users.Read moreRead less
Interactions Between Afferent Channels In Vision: Basic Neurophysiology And Implications For The Pathology Of Dyslexia
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$423,662.00
Summary
We intend to study the interactions between different information channels in the primate visual system. The pathways from the eyes to the brain consist of different types of nerve fibres carrying distinct sorts of information. These channels have been believed to remain separate as they transmit the information through various levels of the brain. Finally, in the neocortex, it has been suggested that the visual information goes along two major streams, one dorsally to the parietal cortex and th ....We intend to study the interactions between different information channels in the primate visual system. The pathways from the eyes to the brain consist of different types of nerve fibres carrying distinct sorts of information. These channels have been believed to remain separate as they transmit the information through various levels of the brain. Finally, in the neocortex, it has been suggested that the visual information goes along two major streams, one dorsally to the parietal cortex and the other ventrally to the temporal cortex. Based upon recent studies, we question this strict segregation of the pathways and propose to study how interactions occur between the two streams and whether the two channels do come together at early levels of the visual pathway. We will also test our idea whether, of the dorsal and ventral streams, one stream might actually gate the other and decide what goes through the other stream. In fact, from our own recent studies, we have reason to believe that the way our attentional system might operate to select salient aspects of the visual scene may be through the dorsal stream selecting what goes into the ventral stream, which seems to be responsible for identifying objects. In the proposed project we will test this idea rigorously. From various lines of evidence, we also argue that the neural mechanisms that underlie this attentional spotlight is exploited by human children when they learn to read. It follows that any defect in the dorsal pathway or in the fibres and cells that feed into this will cause difficulties in reading. We believe this to be the underlying problem in dyslexic children. The project will undertake a number of experiments to test this idea.Read moreRead less
Sub-collection retrieval: understanding and improving search engines. Search engines have become essential in many parts of daily life. This project aims to improve the accuracy of search engines, increasing the productivity of information seeking tasks and reducing frustration with poor search answers, thus improving the current gateway to the world of information.
Effective summaries for search results. All information retrieval systems return a search result page that lists short summaries of each retrieved document. This project will transform search effectiveness by taking a new approach to the understanding, design, and construction of such summaries. Recent work has showed that users fail to click on up to 50 per cent of relevant documents because of poor summary quality. To enhance search result summaries, this project will model how users determine ....Effective summaries for search results. All information retrieval systems return a search result page that lists short summaries of each retrieved document. This project will transform search effectiveness by taking a new approach to the understanding, design, and construction of such summaries. Recent work has showed that users fail to click on up to 50 per cent of relevant documents because of poor summary quality. To enhance search result summaries, this project will model how users determine document relevance when inspecting a summary; it will exploit a previously untapped source of information to dramatically improve summary quality; and, it will create a new approach to retrieving relevant documents by considering their summarisability.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE180101579
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$346,446.00
Summary
Searching when the stakes are high: better health decisions from search engines. This project aims to help people make better health decisions from search engines by improving the information that search queries return. Google is utilised by 80 per cent of Australians to search health symptoms, despite evidence showing that many often find incorrect and unreliable health information. This project expects to provide new understanding about why and how people fail to find useful health information ....Searching when the stakes are high: better health decisions from search engines. This project aims to help people make better health decisions from search engines by improving the information that search queries return. Google is utilised by 80 per cent of Australians to search health symptoms, despite evidence showing that many often find incorrect and unreliable health information. This project expects to provide new understanding about why and how people fail to find useful health information. Expected outcomes of this project include new models and methods for evaluating high-stakes search and new search technologies to help people find and recognise high quality information to make better health decisions. This should provide significant benefits to Australian health consumers and the healthcare system.Read moreRead less
User-Adaptive Search and Evaluation for Complex Information-Seeking Tasks. This project plans to develop a new evaluation framework to understand and characterise web users and their situation within complex, multi-faceted search tasks, exemplified through job-search. While evaluation of web search engine effectiveness is relatively well understood, measuring information retrieval performance in the context of complex tasks with heterogeneous users is a largely neglected problem. This project pl ....User-Adaptive Search and Evaluation for Complex Information-Seeking Tasks. This project plans to develop a new evaluation framework to understand and characterise web users and their situation within complex, multi-faceted search tasks, exemplified through job-search. While evaluation of web search engine effectiveness is relatively well understood, measuring information retrieval performance in the context of complex tasks with heterogeneous users is a largely neglected problem. This project plans to mine user-specific characteristics and situations from complex profiles and interaction logs for online information services run by the industry partner, SEEK. The new techniques are intended to redefine understanding of task-oriented search, and have the potential to reinvent the user experience for complex search tasks. This project will transform how practical search systems are measured within complex task scenarios. This will result in substantial economic impact by enabling businesses providing task-based search services to provide more customized offerings. Within the target domain (job search), this greatly enhances a service highly relevant to Australia's productivity.Read moreRead less
Efficient and effective ad-hoc search using structured and unstructured geospatial information. Web search is a key enabling technology in the information age. However two technologies, ubiquitous mobile devices and massive structured data repositories such as those used to maintain social networking sites, are changing user expectations about how and what should be searched. A key challenge in the research community is how to integrate structured and unstructured information to improve the qual ....Efficient and effective ad-hoc search using structured and unstructured geospatial information. Web search is a key enabling technology in the information age. However two technologies, ubiquitous mobile devices and massive structured data repositories such as those used to maintain social networking sites, are changing user expectations about how and what should be searched. A key challenge in the research community is how to integrate structured and unstructured information to improve the quality of search. This project proposes new approaches to ranked retrieval for location-aware search. In particular, it presents a plan to combine state-of-the-art research from two domains: spatial keyword search in databases, and ad-hoc search in Information Retrieval to improve the quality of search results.Read moreRead less
Developing an active defence system to identify malicious domains and websites. This project aims to develop an innovative active defence system to effectively identify malicious Internet domains and websites. It can secure the cyberspace that is essential to the daily work of Australian people, thus addresses a fundamental problem in safeguarding Australia from cyber crime and terrorism.
Data retrieval from massive information structures. Information search is an essential tool. But most current services regard the data as unstructured collections of independent documents, free of context. Next-generation search applications, such as over social networks, or corporate websites, or XML data sets, must account for the inherent relationships between data items, and must allow the efficient inclusion of search context. Queries should favour semantically local data, giving results th ....Data retrieval from massive information structures. Information search is an essential tool. But most current services regard the data as unstructured collections of independent documents, free of context. Next-generation search applications, such as over social networks, or corporate websites, or XML data sets, must account for the inherent relationships between data items, and must allow the efficient inclusion of search context. Queries should favour semantically local data, giving results that depend on the perceived state of the querier. This project will develop indexing and search techniques for massive structured data sets. The new search methods will incorporate theoretical advances and will be experimentally validated using industry-standard open-source distributed systems.Read moreRead less