Architectural practice in postwar Queensland (1945-1975): building and interpreting an oral history archive. This project will document the histories of Queensland's postwar architects. It will produce a new digital research resource on Queensland architecture and an exhibition which will explore the role of climate, place, innovation and sustainability in Queensland's postwar architecture.
AI-driven Effective Query Formulation for Better Systematic Reviews. This project aims to develop novel AI-based search engine methods to make the creation of systematic reviews cheaper, faster and unbiased. Systematic reviews are the cornerstone for evidence-based decisions in clinical practice and government policy making. Given the pace new research is published at, it is unsustainable to manually conduct systematic reviews in the traditional manner, taking on average 2 years and $350K and be ....AI-driven Effective Query Formulation for Better Systematic Reviews. This project aims to develop novel AI-based search engine methods to make the creation of systematic reviews cheaper, faster and unbiased. Systematic reviews are the cornerstone for evidence-based decisions in clinical practice and government policy making. Given the pace new research is published at, it is unsustainable to manually conduct systematic reviews in the traditional manner, taking on average 2 years and $350K and becoming already outdated when published. The outcomes of this project will lead to systematic reviews of higher quality, while reducing their financial and temporal costs, providing significant benefits to organisations performing reviews and their funders, and to people impacted by decisions made from the reviews.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
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
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