Welcome to an update on CTMTDS Activities January 2022
In 2022 we are going to deliver a newsletter each month. Along with any exciting events or news that occurs that month we are going to focus on the research that is being conducted on a specific Theme.
As of January 1, 2022, Theme 1 Lead Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz will begin a three-year term on #MRIWA board. We are honoured to have MRIWA as a partner of our Centre Melinda was one of the inaugural MRIWA College members and has been involved in MRIWA's Theme Committees before that. To find out more about Melinda and MRIWA please use this link - https://lnkd.in/gzVbEVNF.
Team News
Two of our Research Fellows were successful in getting Academic positions
Dr Hoa Bui has a continuing position with Curtin University. We are pleased she has accepted a secondment to stay as a Theme 2 Research Fellow 3 years
Dr Debora Correa accepted a position with UWA. Debora will stay connected with the Centre continuing to supervise and support PhD Research.
THEME 5
Introduction
Theme 5 is dedicated to the process of translating research driven projects from within the centre into industry usable software and to help increase the impact of the centres research. Theme 5 is comprised of Software Engineers employed by CSIRO with extensive industry experience and who work with researchers on a daily basis.
In practical terms Theme 5 projects can take many different forms but will typically involve one (or many) of:
Help to make research code more “industry ready”
Making project code easier to deploy
Make it more reliable
Improve code readability
Optimise performance
Add industry standard features
Define a documented data model or API around a research model
Implement user Interfaces
Perform adaptions required by an industry partner
Conform to preferred technology or coding language requirements
Integrate with industry standard UI platforms or dashboards
Meet other industry specific deployment requirements
Make use of industry standard development and collaboration practices
Source control (git, merge requests)
Unit Testing
Automated code formatting, linting and coding standards compliance
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
Make use of software development project tracking and issue management tools
Make research code more transferable
Less dependent on a specific industry partners problem or data format
Support the adoption of the research code by different industry partners
Help apply the research it to a different application or industry
Improved deployment through the use of containers and automated deployment pipelines
Code Written From Scratch
In some case code may not have been produced as part of the original research project and it may need to be developed based purely on the research theory
Technical Advice
Providing researchers within the centre technical advice on any of the above topics from the perspective of experienced software engineers with extensive industry experience.
Over the past 6 months Theme 5 has been working with the centres researchers and industry partners on 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 the datasets they are in possession of.
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 specific problem that is trying to be solved.
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 is able to be run locally on a users 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 centres 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:
A schedule visualisation tool, that allows a user to easily view and interactively inspect a schedules pain points or other areas of interest. The tool acts a platform for experimenting with new schedule visualisation techniques for different scheduling problems.
A schedule comparison tool to help a user quickly compare the advantages and disadvantages of multiple different schedules at the same time. This aims to address a common problem when optimising schedules is showing how one optimised schedule is different from another.
An optimiser tool to allow user to execute and easily interact with the schedule optimisation models that have been developed by Theme 3 researchers.
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 and its researchers to easily demonstrate some of the practical web based tools that have been developed as a result of 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.
Stay tuned for our next issue in February where we will cover:
CTMTDS Newsletter Issue 8
Welcome to an update on CTMTDS Activities January 2022
In 2022 we are going to deliver a newsletter each month. Along with any exciting events or news that occurs that month we are going to focus on the research that is being conducted on a specific Theme.
We will start in January with Translation Theme 5
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
In January we congratulated Melinda Hodkiewicz
As of January 1, 2022, Theme 1 Lead Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz will begin a three-year term on #MRIWA board. We are honoured to have MRIWA as a partner of our Centre
Melinda was one of the inaugural MRIWA College members and has been involved in MRIWA's Theme Committees before that.
To find out more about Melinda and MRIWA please use this link - https://lnkd.in/gzVbEVNF.
Team News
Two of our Research Fellows were successful in getting Academic positions
Dr Hoa Bui has a continuing position with Curtin University. We are pleased she has accepted a secondment to stay as a Theme 2 Research Fellow 3 years
Dr Debora Correa accepted a position with UWA. Debora will stay connected with the Centre continuing to supervise and support PhD Research.
THEME 5
Introduction
Theme 5 is dedicated to the process of translating research driven projects from within the centre into industry usable software and to help increase the impact of the centres research. Theme 5 is comprised of Software Engineers employed by CSIRO with extensive industry experience and who work with researchers on a daily basis.
Meet John Hille and Sam Bradley.
In practical terms Theme 5 projects can take many different forms but will typically involve one (or many) of:
Help to make research code more “industry ready”
Perform adaptions required by an industry partner
Make use of industry standard development and collaboration practices
Make research code more transferable
Code Written From Scratch
In some case code may not have been produced as part of the original research project and it may need to be developed based purely on the research theory
Technical Advice
Providing researchers within the centre technical advice on any of the above topics from the perspective of experienced software engineers with extensive industry experience.
Over the past 6 months Theme 5 has been working with the centres researchers and industry partners on 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 the datasets they are in possession of.
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 specific problem that is trying to be solved.
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 is able to be run locally on a users 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 centres 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:
A schedule visualisation tool, that allows a user to easily view and interactively inspect a schedules pain points or other areas of interest.
The tool acts a platform for experimenting with new schedule visualisation techniques for different scheduling problems.
A schedule comparison tool to help a user quickly compare the advantages and disadvantages of multiple different schedules at the same time. This aims to address a common problem when optimising schedules is showing how one optimised schedule is different from another.
An optimiser tool to allow user to execute and easily interact with the schedule optimisation models that have been developed by Theme 3 researchers.
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 and its researchers to easily demonstrate some of the practical web based tools that have been developed as a result of 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:
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.
Stay tuned for our next issue in February where we will cover:
Do you have news to share?
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