Menu toggle

Impact in Collaborative Domains

Below is an overview of some of our research, collaborations and engagements that make a positive contribution and impact, in these key collaborative domains.

Healthy People

Healthy People

Our research contributes to realising better health outcomes for people:

  • COVID-19 Pandemic: related research, advice, and solution development, including: mathematical modelling; advising government;Safe Blues; collaborative projects, including wastewater epidemiology, Clinical Digital Health Platform
  • Cancer: The Australian Cancer Atlas has highlighted substantive differences in cancer survival in Australia; and the potential to save over 1300 lives per year, or 4% of all cancer deaths occurring within 5 years of diagnosis, by removing these geographical disparities. The atlas mapping statistics have been used to develop a new mathematical model to identify important patterns in cancer types.
  • Psychology: Bayesian inference for psychological theories with intractable likelihood
  • Cardiac Function & Health: extending a body of research aimed at understanding heart function and health, including development of new graph-based homogenization techniques for modelling cardiac fibrosis
  • Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders: to better define the nature of the adverse effects associated with prenatal alcohol exposure and to derive more reliable and robust estimates of effect size and critical dose
  • Human Performance: facilitating knowledge transfer regarding human performance (cognitive, physical; individual/team; and with technology) across multiple performance domains, including elite sports, microbiome, and gaming, to better understand and improve physical and/or cognitive performance, applying new methods and tools
  • Alzheimer's Disease: developing models to help to identify pre-clinical disease in otherwise cognitively normal people
  • Connecting Health Research, Policy and Practice: via engagements, including briefings/technical talks for knowledge transfer with the Sax Institute and others
  • Dengue & other infectious diseases: modelling the spread of infectious diseases
  • Biosecurity: new model for biosecurity pest disease dynamics for use in agriculture and then health
  • Elite Athlete/Sports Performance: research to improve performance, including by applying modelling (e.g., for relay analysis and prediction; to reduce the likelihood of recurrent injury from training) and development of new tools for use in this domain (including for efficient computation, inference and learning of state space models)
Key Partner and Industry Affiliate collaborators include:

Government (Federal and State), CSIRO, the Sax Institute, Cancer Council Queensland, Queensland Academy of Sport, Australian Institute of Sport, various Hospital and Health Services, Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, DST

Sustainable environments

Sustainable environments

Our research contributes to sustainable environments:

  • Bushfires & Disasters: Research informing BOM's report to state inquiries and the Bushfire Royal Commission on the increased risks from anthropogenic climate change and CSIRO's "Climate and Disaster: Technical Reports" (2020); ACEMS experts attending ARDC Bushfire Data Challenge workshops/briefings to inform national data infrastructure requirements, projects and collaborations
  • Climate Change: supporting research to better measure and predict climate change and quantify uncertainty
  • Extreme Weather: Development of new methods and research into extreme weather (temperature, rain, wind), including rainfall predictions and impacts
  • Ecosystems: research on 19 ecosystems (in Australia to Antarctica) to combat ecosystem collapse, by identifying ecosystem pressures, collapse profiles and designing a 3As Pathway for threat abatement and ecosystem management
  • Marine Environments: improving ReefCloud platform and AI to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of classifying observation data (reef images) for monitoring
  • Great Barrier Reef: modelling reefs and recovery to disturbances, to inform and improve reef management
  • Citizen Science: Virtual Reef Diver for reef monitoring; research to increase trust and utility of citizen science data
  • Carbon Sequestration: modelling carbon sequestration, with enhanced computational performance
  • Energy Efficiency, Forecasts & Sustainability: including research to improve data center energy efficiency (via profile-guided three-phase virtual resource management) and long-term power generation from waves (via new probabilistic methodology)
  • Automated Monitoring: demonstrating significant cost (99%) and time savings (x200) using AI for image classification in reef monitoring
  • Planetary & Human Health: research at the nexus of planetary and human health, including work on developing an “Australian Environmental Health Atlas”
  • Transport: research to improve more sustainable public transport, including tram bunching challenges
  • Water Quality: Combining computer vision and data science to improve river monitoring and prediction
  • Seagrass: Tools for predicting decline in the face of stresses
  • Mathematical Models for Ecology: Research showing, despite their uncertainty, mathematical models can still be useful in informing management decisions to help ecosystems which aren’t yet well understood
Key Partner and Industry Affiliate collaborators include:

AIMS, BOM, CSIRO, AT&T, VicRoads, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) - for briefings, Department of Environment & Science, Health & Environment Alliance

Prosperous societies

Prosperous societies

Our research contributes to more prosperous societies:

  • National Data Asset: ACEMS seeding discussions at workshops regarding ARDC Data Partnerships call has led to CSIRO leading development of National Scale Human Mobility Data Asset for Australia, helping diverse stakeholders
  • Advanced Manufacturing: co-developing technology for commercialisation by an industry partner to reduce failure rates in 3D printing, including for health applications and deployment across distributed network of printers to harness new capacity in emergencies
  • Misinformation and Bots: identifying misinformation and bot activity on social media
  • Indigenous Knowledge & Research: research collaborations for knowledge exchange (IK & Western Science) to support connecting for and stewardship of country
  • Algorithms: developing new algorithms for industry, and solutions/consultancy to stress-test algorithms (for potential weaknesses, biases, failures)
  • Agriculture: models for the forestry industry to improve product processing, quality, value and profitability; informing farmers' improved land management practices for better carbon sequestration; understanding farm animal behaviour with machine learning, to identify problems remotely
  • Natural Resources: development of predictive models for quantifying and managing resources, such as bore water levels, as a function of diverse predictors
  • Defence: including work quantifying uncertainty in complex systems; projects across Operations Research /ORnet and Human Performance HPRnet knowledge exchange
  • Superannuation and Retirement: reducing risks in the superannuation system: using an economic scenario generator and considering different drawdown strategies
  • Industry Internships, Entrepreneurship & Commercialisation: supporting student APR Intern internships; entrepreneurial learning, action, and initiatives by ACEMS members (e.g. for supply chain optimisation; STEM Game products; MATILDA; and more)
  • Citizen Science: harnessing citizen scientists to contribute valuable data to research, and increase trust in their data, and their capabilities (human capital)
  • Tools: Creating at least ten (10) new open source R software packages downloadable for public use on CRAN (with 19,870,453 total downloads in 2020 alone, and a total of 53+million for all ACEMS R packages on CRAN since 2016)
Key Partner and Industry Affiliate collaborators include:

FLEW Solutions, CloudForge, ATO, Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Department of Human Services, Department of Defence, Science & Technology, Department of Natural Resources, Mines & Energy