QUT is building cutting-edge infrastructure that will help Australians understand how their social media activities influence and impact on our society.
The university has received $460,000 in the latest round of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) funding to build a system that comprehensively tracks and analyses public data about what and how Australians communicate across a range of social media platforms - in real time and over the long term.
The leader of QUT's Social Media Research Group, Associate Professor Axel Bruns, said it was the first time research institutions had pooled their resources to build large-scale social media analytics infrastructure.
"Social media is a very new field of research and academics tend to have to develop their own methodologies and tools for analysing the vast amount of data involved," the Creative Industries Faculty academic said.
"We will spend the next two years building a common infrastructure, doing it once and doing it well, so that we're not all reinventing the wheel for every new social media research project we undertake.
"This not only fills a significant gap in our national research infrastructure - it will make Australia's social media research more robust, stable and reliable because for the first time we'll have a common, standardised basis for our observations, and the certainty that there are no mistakes in the gathering and processing of the social media data."
The world-first social media infrastructure project also involves Curtin, Swinburne and Deakin universities and the National Library of Australia.
Professor Bruns has also been awarded a four-year, $870,398 ARC Future Fellowship to study how social media is redefining Australia's broader media landscape and impacting on the public agenda.
"Social media and other online platforms have changed the relationship between mainstream media and their audiences by enabling ordinary citizens to conduct their own public debates, alongside television, radio and print content," Professor Bruns said.
"As a result, our society has become far more networked, and every day Australians are actively participating in public debates on topics from same-sex marriage through to the National Broadband Network and sledging in the Ashes.
"My Future Fellowship project will determine how Australians find, engage with and share information in the online public sphere - it's about tracking the formation of public opinion in our contemporary online media environment."
QUT staff and projects were awarded almost $8.5 million in the latest round of ARC funding, including 15 ARC Discovery Project grants and five Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) grants and two prestigious Future Fellowships.
Dr Kathy Mills will use her DECRA funding to help close the gap on Indigenous education by developing a new model of literacy learning that is based on Indigenous community practice.
See below for a full list of QUT's ARC grant recipients.
Media contact: Kate Haggman, QUT Media, 3138 0358, kate.haggman@qut.edu.au, after huors 0407 585 901
ARC Future Fellowships
A/Prof Axel Bruns (communication and media studies): $870,398. Trace how information flows across Australia's media spaces and develop a new model of the online public sphere.
Dr Matthew Simpson (applied mathematics): $617,220. Produce new predictive mathematical modelling tools improve our understanding of collective cell migration in relation to cancer and chronic wounds.
ARC Discovery Project grants
Dr Matthew Simpson, A/Prof Scott McCue, Prof Adrian Herington, A/Prof Lisa Chopin, Prof Philip Maini (applied mathematics): $303,000. Develop new mathematical models for the potential of ghrelin-based stategies to control tumour growth.
A/Prof Scott McCue, Prof John King, Prof Stephen Chapman (applied mathematics): $321,000. Develop mathematical techniques in exponential asymptotics to address a deficiency in the classical asymptotic analysis, providing a deeper understanding of pattern formation, instabilities and wave propagation on the interface between two fluids.
Prof Kerrie Mengersen (statistics): $351,000. Bayesian statistics model to address climate change effects on the Great Barrier Reef and better understanding of neurological diseases.
Prof Sridha Sridharan, Dr Simon Lucey, Prof Jeffrey Cohn, A/Prof Clinton Fookes, Dr Michael Sayette, A/Prof Fernando De la Torre (artificial intelligence and image processing): $270,000. Addressing two major problems computer vision systems have in accurately coding facial expressions, make accurate coding of facial expressions in natural environments achievable.
Prof Yuefeng Li, Dr Raymond Lau (artificial intelligence and image processing): $300,000. Exploit domain ontology to find specific ontology which will address challenges in scalability and noisy information within bid text data, leading to a breakthrough for un-supervised classification.
Prof Gordon Wyeth, Prof Peter Corke, Dr Benjamin Upcroft, A/Prof Richi Nayak (artificial intelligence and image processing): $336,000. Develop a robot navigation system using information beyond the robot's range sensors by incorporating knowledge gained by reading room labels, following human route directions or interpreting maps found on the web.
A/Prof Xavier Boyen (data format): $270,000. Recreate and expand the power of functional encryption (FE) from post-quantum (PQ) mathematical principles, immune to quantum attacks, building on recent discoveries of limited forms of PQ-FE from rock-solid cryptography principles.
Prof Paul Roe, Prof Margot Brereton, A/Prof David Watson (information systems): $477,000. How to crowd-source the collection and analysis of environmental animal sounds to enable a bio-acoustic observatory which provides a scalable, objective and permanent record of the environment.
Prof Alistair Barros, Prof Colin Fidge (information systems): $390,000. To make it easier and quicker to re-engineer stand-alone software programs into online services by automating much of the process.
Prof Andry Rakotonirainy, Prof Hesham Rakha, Dr Patricia Delhomme, Prof Narelle Haworth (automotive engineering): $432,000. Research that brings together disciplines of road safety, psychology and engineering to address the fundamental question: how can mobility be greener while being safer?
Prof Simon Washington, Dr Md. Mazharul Haque (civil engineering): $171,277. Develop, test and validate an evidence-based methodology to proactively detect motor vehicle crash black spots; break down observed crashes at a site into their engineering, behavioural, and unobserved spatial components.
Prof Arindam Ghosh (electrical and electronic engineering): $360,000. Develop innovative paradigm-shifting concepts in which power distributions grids will be self-sufficient to look after themselves in the absence of power transmission infrastructure.
Prof David Atchison, Dr Andrew Lambert (ophthalmology and optometry): $390,000. Investigate the advantages of using new beam-shaping techniques for characterising the optics of the eye, improving retinal imagery and improving fixation stability.
Dr Andrew Zele, Prof Jan Kremers, Dr Beatrix Feigl (psychology): $259,706. Investigate vision at dim light levels to addresses fundamental questions about how the retina and brain integrate disparate signals from the rods and cones to produce a homogenous visual percept.
Prof Michael Keane, Dr Brian Yecies, Prof Terry Flew, Prof Anthony Fung, Prof Michael Curtin (communication and media studies): $285,000. Examine changing media collaborations in China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and investigate opportunities and challenges for Australian and other international media companies.
ARC DECRA grants
Dr Melody de Laat (veterinary sciences): $395,199. Determine the role of incretins and their receptors in causing abnormal equine insulin secretion.
Dr Mark Flegg (applied mathematics): $386,820. Create and apply a better model to simulate and predict the effect of Wnt-targeting therapeutic cancer drugs on cancer cell proliferation rates.
Dr Kathy Mills (curriculum and pedagogy): $395,218. Develop a new model of literacy learning based on Indigenous community practice.
Dr Ronald Schroeter (information systems): $395, 220. Design innovative ubiquitous computing technologies that make safe driving more stimulating and pleasurable for young males, who are over-represented in road crashes partly due to their proneness to boredom.
Dr Petrus van Heijster (applied mathematics): $389,564. Apply new understanding of how defects affect mathematical models to build a more appropriate model and a mathematically justifiable analysis of skin cancer.
ARC Discovery Indigenous grants
Prof Aileen Moreton-Robinson, A/Prof Maggie Walter (historical studies): $342,000. Examine Aboriginal collectors' representations of non-Indigenous historical depictions of Aboriginality within Australian material culture.
ARC LIEF grants
A/Prof Axel Bruns, A/Prof Jean Burgess, Dr John Banks, A/Prof Dian Tjondronegoro, A/Prof Alexander Dreiling, Prof John Hartley, Dr Tama Leaver, Dr Anne Aly, Dr Timothy Highfield, Dr Rowan Wilken, A/Prof Ellie Rennie, Dr Dean Lusher, Prof Matthew Allen, Prof Philip Marshall, A/Prof Kristin Demetrious (communication and media studies): $460,000. Build technical and organisational infrastructure for the tracking of public communication by Australian social media users, at large scale, in real time and for the long term.
