ICT Centre Opportunities

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ICT CentreOpportunities Projects with the ICT
Centre

• Dr Mark Cameron
• Research Scientist
• 21 May 2008

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Outline

• Industrial Traineeships
• Postgraduate / Honours Scholarships
• Vacation Scholarships
• Postdoctoral Fellowships
• The Projects
• Searching email
• User Consumable Interface for the Semantic Web
• Data Aggregation in Sensor Networks
• Semantic Database

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Career Opportunities
We live in the age of information. People,
businesses, institutions and governments are all
dependent on information to help them make the
right choices. How information is produced,
collected, sorted, filtered, transmitted,
communicated, interpreted and stored is the
business of one of the fastest growing sectors of
the economy ICT Information and Communication
Technologies. Increasingly, ICT is at the heart
of innovations that deliver benefits to
industries, organisations and individuals.
Smarter and more efficient healthcare, improved
agricultural production, more efficient use of
energy, better environmental monitoring and
management, and security and safety for people
are just some examples of areas where the
benefits of ICT are realised.

• The CSIRO ICT Centre is the hub for ICT research
  in CSIRO, with a mission to deliver the enabling
  power of ICT across many industries. To this end,
  the Centre works across the breadth of CSIRO to
  deliver the power of ICT.
• The Centre has four research laboratories
• Wireless Technologies
• Information Engineering
• Networking Technologies
• Autonomous Systems
• We have also established two centres of
  excellence the E-Health Research Centre located
  in Brisbane and the Tasmanian ICT Centre located
  at Battery Point Hobart.
• Within any one of these groups a fascinating
  career in scientific research can begin.

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Industrial Traineeships

• Who should apply Recent Graduates and Final
  Year Students
• Locations Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart
• Duration 3 or 6 months
• In the interest of contributing to the training
  and experience of tertiary students in science,
  engineering and other relevant fields, and to
  enhance links with tertiary education
  institutions, CSIRO will offer traineeships in
  the form of work experience undertaken in
  conjunction with the formal training of selected
  students which is closely aligned to the ICT
  Centres core research strategy.
• The aim of this program is to contribute to the
  training and experience of tertiary students in
  disciplines relevant to CSIRO's work by providing
  opportunities for work experience within CSIRO.

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Postgraduate/Honours Scholarships

• Who should apply Postgraduate Students who
  possess an APA
• Locations Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart
• Duration 3 years (12 months for Honours)
• The ICT Centre has provided funding for CSIRO
  undergraduate scholarships with six universities
  The University of Sydney The University of New
  South Wales University of Technology Sydney
  Macquarie University The Australian National
  University The University of Queensland
  Queensland University of Technology.
• Students awarded with these scholarships will
  participate in projects that CSIRO and the
  University mutually agree on, with CSIRO
  co-supervising the student projects.
• The aim of postgraduate studentship program is
  to facilitate the training of postgraduate
  students of science and engineering, in
  accordance with CSIRO's interests and its science
  training obligations under its charter.

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Vacation Scholarships

• Who should apply Undergraduate students
• Locations Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart
• Duration 8 12 weeks
• The aim of the vacation scholarship program is
  to contribute to the training and experience of
  promising undergraduates in science or
  engineering, by providing them with an
  opportunity to undertake scientific research in a
  field of mutual interest to CSIRO and to the
  scholars.
• There will be 40 scholarships available for
  students across all ICT Centre sites for next
  summer (2008/09) and they will be advertised in
  May/June 2008.
• Students will be asked choose their
  three preferred topic areas (and the associated
  locations) for undertaking vacation work.
• Applicants will be assessed based on the
  quality of their academic record to date,
  achievements, the topic area and referee reports.
• Vacation students will commence their
  scholarship in November/December 2008.

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Postdoctoral Fellowships

• Who should apply PhD Graduates
• Locations Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Hobart
• Duration 3 year term
• CSIROs purpose in offering postdoctoral
  fellowships is to provide young scientists with
  the opportunity to gain experience in order to
  develop capability for the nation and refresh
  and add value to CSIROs research activities
  through original insights, new knowledge and/or
  techniques.
• A postdoctoral fellowship is intended, first and
  foremost, to enhance the persons research
  capability so that they are better able to pursue
  a career in science either within CSIRO or beyond.

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Searching email

• Paul ThomasCSIRO IE Lab

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Searching email

• The state of the art in web search is very
  sophisticated, and makes use of lots of
  information from the structure of the web (such
  as hyperlinks, page titles, ...).
• The state of the art in email search is very
  primitive, and doesn't do much more than look for
  exact strings in the body of a message.
• But people use email as much as they do the web!

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Searching email

• Can we make use of the structure of email
  messages, and what we know about what works in
  web search, to improve email search?
• For example, it might be useful to give more
  weight to subject lines or to disregard text
  quoted from earlier messages or to do something
  special with signatures.

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Searching email

• A good project in this field would
• Investigate the ways structural clues could help
• Relate this to other semi-structured data this
  could help with Wikipedia search, XML search, web
  search, etc, as well
• Think about how we could demonstrate an advantage
  or improvement in real-world uses.
• It could result in a real improvement to a very
  common taskone which has been long disregarded.

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User Consumable Interface for the Semantic Web

• Dr. Jemma Wu (jemma.wu_at_csiro.au)
• Dr. Xuan Zhou (xuan.zhou_at_csiro.au)
• CSIRO IE Lab

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Google and Wikipedia Are Not Enough!

• Consider the following queries
• Nobel laureate who survived both world wars
• Differences in Rembetiko music from Greece and
  from Turkey
• Market impact of Web2.0 technology in December
  2006
• Proteins that inhibit both protease and some
  other enzyme
• drama with three women making a prophecy to a
  British nobleman that he will become king
• Why? Data on the Web are not stored in a machine
  understandable way.

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The Vision of the Semantic Web
Ontology is the core of the Semantic Web
Transform Web data to structured knowledge that
is understandable by computers
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Hard Time for Users
How to use? Too many concepts Too complex
structure
Semantic Web Ontology
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User Consumable Interface

• Create techniques to reduce users pain when
  accessing the semantic web.
• Subjects (choose one)
• Ontology Summarization
• Sub-ontology Selection
• Query Construction
• What are you going to achieve?
• Developing a prototype
• Evaluating with DBpedia data set
• Contributing to a research paper

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Data Aggregation in Sensor Networks

• Dr Lily Li (Lily.Li_at_csiro.au)CSIRO IE Lab

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Research project Data Aggregation in SN

• A sensor network (Fig. 1) is composed of a large
  number of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional,
  and small sensor nodes (they are
  resource-constrained nodes).
• Sensor node consists of sensing, data processing,
  and communicating components (aggregation is
  possible when a node creates a fused packet by
  looking into and modify the content instead of
  only the packet headers).
• Data aggregation can be applied to combine data
  coming from different sources route to a simple
  sink, allowing in-network consolidation of
  redundant data (conserving energy definitely).
  Strong flavour of distributed computation.

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Objectives

• The work will be on the principles underlying the
  design of data aggregation mechanisms in wireless
  resource-limited networks. The proposed mechanism
  should consider the changes imposed by different
  scenarios and to be able to dynamically adapt to
  it. We expect to have a significant impact on
  prolonging the lifetime of Sensor Networks by
• Minimising the number of transmissions
• Eliminating/reducing redundancy
• Conserving the scarce energy resources

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Wireless sensor network and its applications

• Monitoring, tracking, and controlling
  (Environment observation and forecasting, Habitat
  monitoring, Health)

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Semantic Database

• Dr Lily Li (Lily.Li_at_csiro.au)CSIRO IE Lab

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Research project Semantic Database

• The Semantic Web means many things to different
  people (the technology and concepts are broad)
• RDF, Microformats, OWL
• web services
• AI
• Simple and tangible applications
• It has been used by Google, Yahoo, and Firefox
• Developing new tools, applications and
  architectures on top of the Semantic Web is the
  real challenge (People simply look for the
  utility and usefulness of a system rather than
  the technologies on which it is built on).

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Research Topic Semantic Database

• Algorithms that extract entities out of
  unstructured html pages, and web are at the core
  of our research.
• Such a database (RDF representation. Why RDF?
  Because RDF offers a way to communicate using
  XML-based language) would be powerful because it
  could be queried much like relational
  databases.
• Hot issue How to keep up with the change of the
  world?
• Handle continuous influx of user data (for
  example, from Wikis)
• Parse it
• Update the database

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Contacts

• Searching email
• Paul Thomas paul.thomas_at_csiro.au
• User Consumable Interface for the Semantic Web
• Jemma Wu jemma.wu_at_csiro.au
• Xuan Zhou xuan.zhou_at_csiro.au
• Data Aggregation in Sensor Networks
• Lily Li lily.li_at_csiro.au

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More information

• For more information and current career
  opportunities please visit the CSIRO careers
  website at www.csiro.au/careers

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Thank you
CSIRO ICT Centre Dr Mark Cameron Research
Scientist Phone [phone] Email
mark.cameron_at_csiro.au Web www.csiro.au