Welcome to an update on CTMTDS activities.
Highlights #
CTMTDS Launch #
The Australian Research Council Training Centre for Transforming Maintenance through Data Science was officially launched at a ceremony held at Curtin University on Friday 21 February. The event, emceed by Prof Andrew Rohl, was attended by the Honourable Steve Irons MP, Assistant Minister for Vocational Education, Training and Apprenticeships, the Honourable Bill Johnston MLA, Minister for Mines and Petroleum, Professor Sue Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Research Council, Curtin University Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry, and by ITTC students, researchers and industry partner staff.
Data Risk Assessment Tool #
The Systems Health Lab (UWA), along with the Centre, developed a Data Risk Assessment Tool (DRAT) that is being utilised by our partners to assess and then justify releasing data to the Centre. It has been made available outside the Centre at https://drat-process.com/home and has received positive feedback from around the world. The tool has been fundamental in establishing trust with the partners to enable them to release data that would have otherwise been kept in-house and not available to researchers.
Employment of Research Fellows and Students #
Research Fellows #
We have engaged all six research fellows, exceeding our plan for 2019. Of the six, five started in 2019, and we were able to start industry introductions and immersions for them. We were successful in recruiting a balance across genders (50% female), institutions and experience. We have a diversity of expertise across pure mathematics, statistics, computer science and engineering. Please see the following link for more information about the Centre Research Fellows.
PhD students #
We currently have 5 out of our planned 12 PhD students on board. Two of our PhD students are completing their PhDs through the University of Western Australia in Theme 1. The other three are completing their PhDs through Curtin, two in Theme 2 and one in Theme 3. We have one student in Theme 3 who is experiencing VISA delays. For more information about our students please see the following link.
Honours students #
The Centre sponsored three Honours students, one in each Theme, for 2020. For more information on our three honours students please see the following link.
Start of Industry Placements #
All three industry partners set up immersion placements in their organisations for the five RFs who joined the Centre in 2019. They spent five days at Roy Hill, two days on-site at an Alcoa refinery, and five days with the Research and Development team at BHP.
In 2020 BHP Nickel West, Roy Hill and Alcoa have all organised placements for our PhD students. Due to COVID-9 social isolation regulations, the placement with Alcoa is being conducted virtually, with our PhD student attending online daily ‘stand-up’ meetings with Alcoa representatives.
Workshops organised #
February 2020 was a big month for workshops.
At the end of 2019, the Centre hosted an externally-facilitated half-day workshop attended by industry partners and researchers. The purpose of the workshop was to come to a common understanding of the objectives and outcomes of the Centre. A subgroup of industry partners and the Centre Directorate followed up by developing a statement of purpose that could be used as an elevator pitch and translate key objectives from which we would develop industry KPIs in addition to our ARC KPIs.
Michael Stewart and Wei Liu organised a Natural Language Processing-themed workshop on the 10 February. The workshop was attended by a diverse audience of 30 attendees, including two international visitors, a number of PhD students, several members of the Centre, and staff from
industry, including Bettina Tran from industry partner Roy Hill. Talks ranged from foundational NLP concepts, such as word embeddings, to system demonstrations and the theory/practical applications of specific NLP areas such as entity recognition, knowledge graphs, and NLP in the maintenance domain. The workshop provided an opportunity to welcome and learn from our international visitors, Assoc. Prof. Johann Mitlöhner from Vienna University of Technology, and Prof. Arno Scharl from Modul University Vienna.
Starting on the 11th February, Adriano Polpo organised a short course focusing on utilising statistics.
Aloke Phatak organised a workshop with the Operating Committee and the Centre Research Fellows on 21 February 2020. The purpose of this workshop was to discuss the progress of projects, criteria for selecting projects, and to identify and overcome barriers to engagements between industry and the ITTC. The workshop identified seven criteria for project selection. Attendees agreed that projects should “simplify the work from a productivity and safety perspective”.
A Technical Language Processing workshop was held on the UWA campus on 4th March. This was organised by Melinda Hodkiewicz, and was attended by more than 20 researchers and students from UWA, Curtin and CSIRO. Outputs of the workshop include a list of current and future group projects as well as clarification on individual projects. The collective ideas about the need to tailor NLP for the engineering domain led to the coining of a new name for the area - Technical Language Processing.
Project and Data Workflow #
The Centre has developed and deployed an efficient project and data workflow using Jira to track project proposals/approvals and associated data requests/approvals. All interactions with the workflow are logged, ensuring transparency. The workflow is linked to CKAN, an open-source data
portal for storing industry data on secure servers; it also incorporates the DRAT tool mentioned above so that the process of assessing and then approving data for storage in the Centre is seamless. We believe that the Centre workflow can serve as a model for other ITTCs. Its development was partially supported by ARDC grant “Supporting Industry and Academia/Researchers to have FAIR data in the ARC ITTC for Data Science Transforming Maintenance” ($49,999).
In the spotlight #
Professor Michael Small and Dr Débora Corrêa on being awarded with an ARC Discovery Grant in the 2020 round. This grant is for research using time series network animal modelling. This research will be applied to support livestock welfare during transport. Dr Débora Corrêa on being awarded a National Geographic Society – AI for Earth Innovation Grant. This is for mapping the effects of land clearing on temperature extremes across Oceania and Indonesia's deforestation hotspots. Collaborators include A/Prof Sally Thompson (UWA/Environmental Engineering), Prof Michael Small (UWA/Maths and Stats) and John Duncan (UWA/Agriculture).
Prof Andrew Rohl on receiving the title of John Curtin Distinguished Professor; the highest honour Curtin awards its academic staff. The title recognises the sustained contributions researchers have made to the University and wider community.
Hoa Bui for achieving an Australian Mathematical Society Lift-off Fellowship. This award is designed to help recent PhD graduates in mathematics and statistics jump-start their career. The Lift-off Fellowships are awarded on the basis of academic merit, and the field of applicants for these
fellowships is very strong.
Prof Ryan Loxton on receiving an Academy of Science Award. The Christopher Heyde Medal was awarded to Ryan for his pioneering new mathematical algorithms for optimising complex systems in a wide range of applications such as mining, robotics, agriculture, and industrial process control.
Stay tuned for next month discussion on:
- The Centres involvement in the CORE Skills program.
- Research of interest.