Category Archives: Research

Dealing with ecosystems IV: Hope in constraints?

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Graham Harris v3By Graham Harris

This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #10

In the last three blogs we saw that management and restoration of the entities we call ecosystems is problematic and driven by assumptions, myths and values. This is particularly so at the level of species and populations. Conservation biology and restoration ecology have had their local successes, but overall, the response to major initiatives has been poor. Global biodiversity continues to decline and, while there are strong calls to restore landscapes, going back to a prior state seems very difficult. Continue reading →

Big data platform for mining user-generated content (UGC)

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Jack YangBy Jie (Jack) Yang

I am currently undertaking a study which uses an innovative cloud-computing tool – developed here at SMART Infrastructure Facility – to collect, analyse, and visualise data from different social media networks in Australia, China and Korea. Specifically, it aims to investigate how different countries are using social media platforms respectively to contribute to topical conversations on culture and politics. By gathering, sorting, and displaying information from millions of data records on various topics such as films and TV dramas, this project will increase public awareness among three different countries. Continue reading →

Mining a System: The Use of Data Mining and System Dynamics to Explore Technology Integration

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??????????????????????By Jack (Jie) Yang, Jun Ma & Sarah Howard

Technological innovation in schools has, as yet, resulted in relatively limited teacher and student engagement with new ways of learning supported through information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the possible reasons for this is that educational research has struggled to grasp the complexity or dynamic nature of technology integration. Data mining techniques have drawn the attention of researchers from the education research area to understand some of the complexity of technology integration within a theoretical system model of technology integration. Continue reading →

Dealing with ecosystems III: Causal thickets and changing correlations

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Graham Harris v3By Graham Harris

This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #9

This is a good place to stop for a while and read William Wimsatt’s (2007) book Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality. Wimsatt’s goal in writing that book was to provide a guide to bounded rationalism and heuristics for a messy world.  The book draws on a wide range of sources including Andreas Wagner and one of my favourite books, Daniel Dennett’s (1995) “Darwin’s dangerous idea: evolution and the meanings of life. Dennett pointed out anyone that takes a consequentialist view whilst living in the middle of a system can only ever have partial knowledge. Continue reading →

Dealing with ecosystems II: The field of myths and dreams

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Graham Harris v3By Graham Harris

This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #8

At present, working either with a restricted set of values or when we claim to be totally value free (impossible in practice), we plan remediation programmes as “predict-act” schemes and then fail to deliver the goods. It’s very much like the myth of the field of dreams: “build it and they will come…” but often they don’t! [Remember the important roles of chance, necessity and 2nd order interactions.] Continue reading →

Development and comparison of two interaction indices between extractive activity and groundwater resources

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SMART EduBlog- Johan Barthelemy – Traffic Micro-simulation- Image 1By Dr Johan Barthelemy

Groundwater and rock are intensively exploited in the world. Given the population density and environmental pressures, quarry lateral extension may be limited. Hence the only solution for the rock operators is to excavate deeper as long as the deposit structure makes it possible. Consequently the water table of the geological formation exploited might be reached when the quarry is deepened. A dewatering system is therefore installed so the quarry activities can continue, possibly impacting the nearby water catchments. Continue reading →

Crowd-sourcing Twitter data as a solution to emergency response to flooding in Jakarta

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15785336539_294f5ee35d_oBy Dr Tomas Holderness & Dr Etienne Turpin

The early June release of the PetaJakarta.org White Paper marked the end of the first phase of the ground breaking research program. Continue reading →

Tweet Semantics

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Rodney ClarkeBy Associate Professor Rodney Clarke

All major approaches used to analyse tweets (statistical and machine learning) proceed from the segmentation and classification of lexical items (words). An alternative approach involving computer-based grammars is rarely used because they do not scale well to the dimensions necessary for the analysis of PetaJakarta tweet traffic. All current approaches are syntactic and asemantic. They are incapable of addressing questions concerning how citizens are actually using social media platforms during emergencies because they are incapable of explaining how language is structured for use. Continue reading →

Development of an integrated predictive model for diabetes complications

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SMART EduBlog- Nagesh Shukla – Development of an integrated predictive model for diabetes complications- Image 1By Research Fellow Nagesh Shukla

Diabetes is spreading all around the world as an unprecedented epidemic. According to a report from International Diabetes Federation, in 2011, 366 million people had diabetes and by 2030 this will have risen to 552 million (8.3% compared to 9.9% of the adult population, respectively). Continue reading →

Interactive prototyping of interactivity

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profile photoBy Professor John Sören Petersson

In today’s world with ever more systems and services constantly released, designing human-machine interaction is a must. The problem with interaction design is not that we are not good at interaction. Social skills vary across individuals, but seeing two strangers, possibly even without a mutual language, making up a mutual understanding step-by-step clearly indicates the human ability to interact and thus to shape interaction. Continue reading →