Page History
In 2022 the Centre's newsletter will be sent out monthly. Along with any exciting events or news, we'll be focusing on research that is being conducted by one of the Centre's Themes. We'll begin this month with Translation Theme 5
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Congratulations to Melinda Hodkiewicz!
Congratulations to Theme 1 Lead, Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz, who will begin a three-year term on the board of the Minerals Research Institute of WA (MRIWA). Melinda was one of the inaugural MRIWA College members and has also been involved in MRIWA's Theme Committees. Click here to find out more about Melinda's new role at MRIWA.
Team News
Two of the Centre's Research Fellows were successful in getting academic positions:
- Dr Hoa Bui has accepted a continuing position in mathematics at Curtin University, and we are very pleased that she's staying on as a Theme 3 Research Fellow.
- Dr Debora Correa accepted a position in computing with UWA. She'll stay connected with the Centre as a Chief Investigator and continue to supervise Honours and PhD candidates.
A new member joined the Centre in January:
- Dr Elham Mardaneh has come on board to represent Research Theme 3 on the Operating Committee. She'll also be involved in student supervision.
THEME 5
Introduction
Theme 5 is dedicated to translating the Centre's outputs into industry-usable software to increase the impact of the Centre's research. Theme 5 comprises software engineers employed by CSIRO who have extensive industry experience and who work with researchers on a daily basis.
Meet Dr Jens Klump, John Hille and Alex Hunt. Theme 5 is also supported by Rini Angreani and Yunlong Li
In practical terms Theme 5 projects can take many different forms but will typically involve one (or many) of:
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Over the past 6 months Theme 5 has been working with the Centre's researchers and industry partners on translating the following projects:
Theme 5 Activities
IDEA Tool
The IDEA tool is a research project initially developed by Ayham Zaitouny and Michael Small to help data custodians and data scientists better understand their datasets.
The tool uses a combination of qualitative analysis in the form of a set of dynamically generated questions and statistical analysis to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of any potential dataset and help determine how well it may be suited to the problem it's being used to solve.
As a final result the user receives an easy-to-understand summary score relating to the various aspects of the data that the tool is testing for.
Theme 5 engineers Sam Bradley, Rini Angreani and John Hille have worked with Ayham to convert his original Jupyter Notebook-based concept into a web based prototype that can be run locally on a user's machine or deployed to a server environment.
The team is planning to have an internal review to finalise the questions and their impact based on the collective experience of the Centre's researchers.
Platypus
Platypus is a web-based tool developed by Tyler Bikaun that uses natural language processing to help maintenance engineers produce fast and reproducible reliability estimation.
As part of the a Theme 5 translation project, Alex Hunt and John Hille have been working with Tyler to help improve the functionality and performance of the tool to make it more useful in an industry context and help to more clearly define and document the application deployment process.
As a result of these efforts a demonstration version of the Platypus application is the first to be deployed to the new cloud demonstration environment.
Schedule Optimisation Tools
The schedule optimisation tools are a suite of applications to help solve some of the common problems dealing with planning and optimising schedules which are common tasks within the centres Theme 3 projects.
There are 3 proposed tools, each targeted at resolving a different problem:
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All of these tools have been designed to work with easily reproducible data formats that will be defined and documented to allow for easy integration with external scheduling tools.
John Hille has been working with Hoa Bui and Mojtaba Heydar to help define these problems and develop the tools.
Significant progress has been made on prototype tools that will be soon be available for internal demonstrations.
Cloud Demonstration Environment
A cloud-based demonstration environment has been commissioned by Theme 5 to allow the centre Centre and its researchers to easily demonstrate some of the practical web-based tools that have been developed as a result of from their projects.
The demonstration environment makes use of Docker and Kubernetes and acts as a live demonstration of modern automated deployment techniques and shows how containers an be used to simplify application deployments and avoid issues associated with deploying software on different target environments.
To be a candidate for the cloud demonstration environment an application must:
- Have a web based user interface to demonstrate its concept, even if in simple prototype form.
- Be suitable for sharing with the general public.
- Have no dependence on industry partner data or IP.
- Not require any commercial or proprietary software packages.
The three Theme 5 activities outlined in this update should all be able to be deployed to the environment in some form and will be available to be demonstrated inside and outside the centre in the coming weeks.
