What are High Performance Computing and Cloud Computing?
High performance computing is where we connect lots of smaller computers (compute nodes) via very high-speed connections into one machine that we can treat, using special software, almost as if it’s just a single very big computer. Continue reading
By Joe Branigan
Some of Australia’s best public policy minds meet in Brisbane today for the Queensland Jobs Growth Summit. Continue reading
This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #11.
I have just spent a month in UK and have had time to reflect on the changes I have observed there since I was a child in Devon. This time our stay in England corresponded with the summer holiday period and, while the weather was awful, the traffic was worse. Continue reading
By Tim Davies
Armed with a poster I recently attended the 2015 eResearch conference in sunny Brisbane. The eResearch conference usually brings together the best and brightest eResearchers from across the globe and this year was no exception. The theme of the conference was ‘Fuelling the Knowledge Economy’ the fuel in this case was the stimulating discussions and presentations centring around new information-centric research capabilities. SMART joined in on these discussions with a captivating poster that illustrated many of the eResearch capabilities that the SMART infrastructure Facility has to offer. Continue reading
This blog is part of the Thinking Systems series, and has been published early as it is relevant to a presentation Graham is making as part of the SMART Seminar Series. For more information, view the seminar flyer online. Continue reading
By Nam Huynh
Micro-simulations, such as epidemiology models or activity-based models for urban transport demanding forecasting purposes, usually involve a large number of agents representing the real population living in the area being studied. It is however extremely expensive, if not impossible (due to stringent privacy laws in certain countries), to carry out a survey that obtains a fully disaggregated data set to describe the demographics and characteristics of the agents of interest. Continue reading
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
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
Natural hazards have the potential to cause large scale impacts and disruption to all countries and if these events occur in highly populated areas the impacts can be catastrophic. The severity and lasting impact of these hazards are often linked to the resilience of critical infrastructure systems (including: water distribution networks, electrical systems and transportation networks) which underpin our communities and support social and economic development. Continue reading
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
