Studying 'research' in Australia’s library and information profession. With over 111 million annual visits, libraries are fundamental to Australia's social fabric and increasingly to its success as a national economy. In the current volatile economic climate Australia's libraries are being called upon to do more with less. This project aims to help Australia's libraries to contribute in a more powerful way to national productivity by helping library and information professionals make tough decis ....Studying 'research' in Australia’s library and information profession. With over 111 million annual visits, libraries are fundamental to Australia's social fabric and increasingly to its success as a national economy. In the current volatile economic climate Australia's libraries are being called upon to do more with less. This project aims to help Australia's libraries to contribute in a more powerful way to national productivity by helping library and information professionals make tough decisions in an environment where there is competition for limited resources. This project aims, for the first time, build an evidence base on research in Australia's library and information profession. It will establish a framework that can be used by library and information professionals to build a research culture that enables the adoption of "practitioner-researcher" as an approach to professional practice.Read moreRead less
Real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance. This interdisciplinary research project aims to explore how records co-creation can be conceptualised in child protection and information law and overseen dynamically through a new digitally enabled, child-centred and rights-based advocacy and regulatory framework, to play an integral role in ensuring that the systems to protect children from abuse and neglect do not themselves cause harm. This project seeks to develop participatory information go ....Real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance. This interdisciplinary research project aims to explore how records co-creation can be conceptualised in child protection and information law and overseen dynamically through a new digitally enabled, child-centred and rights-based advocacy and regulatory framework, to play an integral role in ensuring that the systems to protect children from abuse and neglect do not themselves cause harm. This project seeks to develop participatory information governance as a new theoretical foundation for proactive recordkeeping and rights advocacy for childhood out-of-home Care. Improved transparency, accountability, efficiency and access to justice are anticipated benefits from this legal, recordkeeping and information infrastructure design research.Read moreRead less
Improving Interactions for Digital Browsing of Large Collections. Browsing for information is an established and fundamental part of how people find the knowledge that they need. However, our current understanding of how browsing succeeds or fails is poor. This is because we have limited empirical data, and until recently, the available technologies to create detailed data on what people actually look at and when were very limited. As a result, digital browsing methods have been almost universal ....Improving Interactions for Digital Browsing of Large Collections. Browsing for information is an established and fundamental part of how people find the knowledge that they need. However, our current understanding of how browsing succeeds or fails is poor. This is because we have limited empirical data, and until recently, the available technologies to create detailed data on what people actually look at and when were very limited. As a result, digital browsing methods have been almost universally inferior to real-world counterparts. Given the lack of fundamental theories to inform design, this is unsurprising. After creating a detailed and systematic account of user behaviour in browsing, we will create novel designs that will accelerate the discovery of information, particularly for innovative work.Read moreRead less
Finding answers for complex questions. This project aims to develop a new search paradigm for on-line search engines that presents users with answers to complex questions, rather than forcing them to find answers themselves from lists of retrieved documents. The project will develop a taxonomy of complex answer search tasks, devise novel techniques to increase the effectiveness of complex answer retrieval through interaction and, create a new evaluation framework for precise measurement of syste ....Finding answers for complex questions. This project aims to develop a new search paradigm for on-line search engines that presents users with answers to complex questions, rather than forcing them to find answers themselves from lists of retrieved documents. The project will develop a taxonomy of complex answer search tasks, devise novel techniques to increase the effectiveness of complex answer retrieval through interaction and, create a new evaluation framework for precise measurement of system effectiveness. This project should provide significant advances that will benefit all users of search engines.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200100064
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$422,022.00
Summary
Fair and Transparent Information Access in Spoken Conversational Assistants. This project aims to investigate how rich information needed to answer complex questions can be delivered via a speech-only communication channel. Using laboratory user studies, where users can interact with a smart speaker to ask for information about controversial or multi-perspective topics, the project expects to advance knowledge on how to expose pertinent information without creating or reinforcing biases. Expecte ....Fair and Transparent Information Access in Spoken Conversational Assistants. This project aims to investigate how rich information needed to answer complex questions can be delivered via a speech-only communication channel. Using laboratory user studies, where users can interact with a smart speaker to ask for information about controversial or multi-perspective topics, the project expects to advance knowledge on how to expose pertinent information without creating or reinforcing biases. Expected outcomes include novel presentation strategies to access rich information via audio in a fair manner. This should significantly benefit the visually impaired and low-literacy communities by enhancing their access to topics with multiple point of views, which would impact decision making such as who to vote for in elections.Read moreRead less
Legal and social dynamics of eBook lending in Australia’s public libraries. Legal and social dynamics of eBook lending in Australia’s public libraries. This project aims to develop an evidence base of quantitative and qualitative data about how eBooks are used in libraries. EBooks have tremendous beneficial potential, particularly for Australians in remote areas and those with impaired mobility or vision. However, libraries’ rights to acquire and lend them are more restricted than for physical b ....Legal and social dynamics of eBook lending in Australia’s public libraries. Legal and social dynamics of eBook lending in Australia’s public libraries. This project aims to develop an evidence base of quantitative and qualitative data about how eBooks are used in libraries. EBooks have tremendous beneficial potential, particularly for Australians in remote areas and those with impaired mobility or vision. However, libraries’ rights to acquire and lend them are more restricted than for physical books. Libraries and legal, social and data science researchers will investigate eBook lending practices and understand their social impacts. The project will identify ways of reforming policy, law, and practice to help libraries fulfil their public interest missions. This project is expected to enable libraries to extract more value from existing public investments.Read moreRead less
Suharto's enablers? Social complicity in the Indonesian killings of 1965-66. This projects aims to revolutionise understandings of civilian involvement in the most critical and bloody turning point in modern Indonesian history, the 1965-66 killings, and to transform the evidence base for Indonesian history-writing. By accessing critically endangered and never before used survivor community archives, the project will examine the complicity of civilians in the killings and how the violence shaped ....Suharto's enablers? Social complicity in the Indonesian killings of 1965-66. This projects aims to revolutionise understandings of civilian involvement in the most critical and bloody turning point in modern Indonesian history, the 1965-66 killings, and to transform the evidence base for Indonesian history-writing. By accessing critically endangered and never before used survivor community archives, the project will examine the complicity of civilians in the killings and how the violence shaped modern Indonesian national identity and moral consciousness. It will further generate a new, centralised archive of these preserved materials and compile new oral history interviews with the remaining witnesses to these pivotal events.Read moreRead less
New approaches to interactive sessional search for complex tasks. This project aims to develop new tools and techniques to improve the accuracy and speed of search and data analytics for complex information tasks. There are currently no publicly available search engines which support users engaged in complex interactive search, or that allow searchers to fully control their own data and privacy. Fundamental research advances, based on understanding real user behaviour and search needs will have ....New approaches to interactive sessional search for complex tasks. This project aims to develop new tools and techniques to improve the accuracy and speed of search and data analytics for complex information tasks. There are currently no publicly available search engines which support users engaged in complex interactive search, or that allow searchers to fully control their own data and privacy. Fundamental research advances, based on understanding real user behaviour and search needs will have an impact on important academic, industrial, and government domains, including virtual assistants, health care (clinical decision support), precision medicine, eDiscovery, crime prevention, and detailed socio-economic evaluations.Read moreRead less
Making Crime Pay: Manufacturing Heritage Experiences in a Digital Age. This project aims to create digital tools to allow visitors to experience Australian convict sites and historical big data in new and novel ways. The project expects to forge a synergistic long-term relationship between archives, historical sites and research programs through pioneering thematic digital storytelling techniques, allowing audiences to access research data not previously curated for public consumption. Expected ....Making Crime Pay: Manufacturing Heritage Experiences in a Digital Age. This project aims to create digital tools to allow visitors to experience Australian convict sites and historical big data in new and novel ways. The project expects to forge a synergistic long-term relationship between archives, historical sites and research programs through pioneering thematic digital storytelling techniques, allowing audiences to access research data not previously curated for public consumption. Expected outcomes include enhanced international and disciplinary collaborations, generating standards for curating digital site, archival and collection data, and new means of communicating research results to a wider public, especially descendants. This should provide significant benefits to heritage site operators. Read moreRead less
Efficient Compression and Querying Techniques for Massive Text Collections. Web search services have become a fundamental tool used by governments, businesses, and individuals, and play a key role in our access to knowledge and information. In this project we aim to develop new techniques for representing the indexes at the heart of web search services, and to devise new processing algorithms with reduced resource requirements for resolving queries and providing useful and topical answers. Hig ....Efficient Compression and Querying Techniques for Massive Text Collections. Web search services have become a fundamental tool used by governments, businesses, and individuals, and play a key role in our access to knowledge and information. In this project we aim to develop new techniques for representing the indexes at the heart of web search services, and to devise new processing algorithms with reduced resource requirements for resolving queries and providing useful and topical answers. Higher query throughput and reduced storage load will benefit providers though reduced hardware and electricity costs, and will benefit society through better access to information, enhanced opportunities to connect and collaborate, and greater long-term scalability as on-line resources continue to multiply.Read moreRead less