Faculty of Engineering
Digital Sciences Initiative Newsletter
December 2023
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This has been another great year for the Digital Sciences Initiative (DSI). We undertook a comprehensive strategic planning process, refining our vision of establishing Sydney as one of the key international centres in digital innovation and articulating a new mission statement of ‘Delivering Sovereign Capability in the Digital Sciences’. We have also refined our strategic priority activities, with a focus on fostering interdisciplinary research, working more closely with industry, growing our national and international partnerships, developing options for Masterclasses and short courses as well as programs for high school outreach, improving access to critical digital infrastructure and embracing a diverse range of contributors to the DSI objectives.
Across 2023, the DSI team has led a series of workshops to bring our academic colleagues from across the institution together to identify grand challenges of societal concern aligned with our research-oriented missions. This DSI cuts across faculties to address significant challenges in areas such as health, agriculture and food, manufacturing, resources, energy and the environment, national security and social inequality. We have also engaged closely with industry to identify new areas for collaborative research, ranging from innovation in the aviation industry, new manufacturing technologies, the management of resources and energy, transformation of supply chains and logistics and innovation in the medtech sector.
As the year draws to a close, we are looking forward to another exciting year ahead with plans to continue growing our impact across the Digital Sciences. If you are interested in joining us, please reach out to dsi@sydney.edu.au to be included in future invitations for collaborative workshops and regular updates on our progress.
Professor Stefan B. Williams
Director, Digital Sciences Initiative
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DSI 2023 Year in Review
- Hosted numerous industry visits and lab tours, including groups from the manufacturing, agriculture, medtech, and defence sectors in addition to NSW State and Federal Government representatives.
- Provided support and resources for two ITTC submissions.
- Organised a series of strategy workshops with our research missions to inform the overarching DSI strategy.
- Led a DSI Retreat with over 50 academics from across all faculties.
- Funded 8 DSI Pilot projects
- Facilitated 15 Stage 1 industry seed workshops, 3 Stage 2 seed scoping studies and 2 Stage 3 seed funding opportunities to support the development of large scale, collaborative research centre bids.
- Supported 9 Vacation Research Internships over winter and summer in the areas of digital sciences and technologies.
- Commenced interdisciplinary networking activities through the DSI Seminar Series
- DSI academics featured at Raising the Bar
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ITTC Grant Application Submission
With the support of a DSI Seed Project Grant Scheme (Stage 3), Prof. Fernando Calamante together with colleagues from the DSI Digital Health Imaging mission ( A/Prof. Luping Zhou, Prof. Jinman Kim, Dr. Andre Kyme, Dr. Sasha Rubin, Dr. Ryan Sullivan, and Dr. Chenyu Wang) recently submitted a grant application for the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centres scheme. Their “ARC Training Centre for AI Medical Imaging Transformation (AIMIT)” application is a collaboration with The University of Queensland (led by Prof. Markus Barth), Monash University (led by A/Prof. Zhaolin Chen), and 12 industry partners from across the spectrum of medical imaging. The Training Centre aims to transform Australia’s Medical Imaging industry by providing a new generation of AI Imaging Change Leaders who will link research and innovation in academia to industry.
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DSI Retreat
We held our DSI retreat at the Fairmont Resort, Leura in the Blue Mountains on the 13th and 14th of Nov with over 50 academics representing all faculties in attendance. It was a very successful event with panel sessions focused on external engagement, discussions on Mission strategies, multidisciplinary grand challenge pilot projects, fundamental research focus areas, opportunities for our Digital Sciences Education program and team building activities. The input gathered from the retreat will be used to formulate our goals and plans for 2024. More details can be found here.
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DSI Strategy Workshops
The Digital Sciences Initiative organised a series of strategy development workshops during Oct-Nov comprising each of our research missions. The outcomes of these workshops are informing the overarching DSI strategy. We had very engaged participation and interest from academics across the faculties resulting in some great project ideas and thoughts around societal challenges that could be addressed by the DSI.
These workshops were also designed to identify key research/infrastructure capabilities and value proposition for the missions that could be leveraged to address the grand challenges.
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Collaboration with Industry
The University of Sydney signed a Memorandum of Understanding with aerospace and defence company Safran during the Indo Pacific 2023 International Maritime Exposition in November 2023. This opens up significant opportunity to collaborate and leverages our expertise across a broad range of research related to the digital sciences, in particular our expertise in areas related to machine learning, robotics, autonomous systems, communications and sensor design. This collaboration complements existing work funded through the NSW Defence Innovation Network and other sources. More info
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DSI VRI Scholarships
The Digital Sciences Initiative is committed to training young minds in the digital sciences and has offered 6 scholarships in 2023 for the upcoming summer Vacation Research Internship (VRI) program. The DSI scholarships will provide the necessary skills and training to our students to advance their digital technologies careers. Networking for VRI students commenced on the 8th of Dec 2023 with a spotlight on DSI by Director Prof. Stefan Williams.
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Collaboration meeting with Germany
An online collaboration meeting with Forschungszentrum Jülich in Data Science and Simulation through their initiative CASA – Center for Advanced Simulation and Analytics was held on the 23rd of Nov. Julich formed part of the Helmholtz delegation that visited USyd in March 2023 and expressed their interest to engage more closely with the DSI activities. CASA is organised in so-called CASA Simulation and Data Labs (SDL) in which cross-disciplinary teams work on research questions from application areas including Neuroscience, Climate Science, Energy Materials, Quantum, Healthcare, Bioeconomy to name a few. The meeting was well attended by members of the DSI and NZI teams and funding opportunities are being considered.
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DSI Seminar Series
The DSI seminar series was launched in August 2023 and has gained a successful following. The seminar series featured 8 talks over the past four months covering a diverse range of topics including digital health, natural language processing, fundamentals of neural networks, legal frameworks around AI and probabilistic planning. Our speakers included both internal and external academics. This series has facilitated a platform for multidisciplinary ideas to converge and is designed to provide networking opportunities. More details of the seminar series in 2023 can be found here.
The final DSI seminar talk in the series for this year was given by Professor Sally Cripps from UTS on The Art and Science of Causal Discovery. The talks for 2024 will resume on the 14th of February, with A/Prof. Tongliang Liu on Machine learning with noisy labels.
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DSI Agriculture - Narrabri Field Day
On the 19th of Sept 2023, the Digital Agriculture team in partnership with the Sydney Institute of Agriculture participated in the annual Narrabri Field day at the I. A. Watson Grains Research Centre. The team showcased the capabilities of their robots – the Digital Farmhand and the Swagbot which can perform autonomous soil sampling and route following. The demonstrations attracted great interest from participants that included high school students and industry representatives.
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Indo Pacific 2023
The DSI team was actively involved in supporting the University of Sydney’s booth at the Indo Pacific 2023 International Maritime Exposition, 6th-9th Nov 2023. The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle and additive manufacturing samples from the Sydney Manufacturing Hub were highlights and attracted considerable interest from delegates. The DSI team was also involved in a range of industry and government tours to showcase our labs and capabilities to international guests who were visiting Sydney for the expo. More details here.
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DSI Digital Innovation Teaching Workshop
Our distinguished guest, Professor Rolando Chacon from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), led an interactive half-day workshop in November 2023 on innovation in teaching using digital twin representations of objects through measurement. He demonstrated his innovative digital teaching tools that he has developed over the past decade. Participants included a diverse cohort of research students and academic staff from across the University of Sydney and UNSW who were engaged in a fun and informative experiment using the digital tools provided to them. Through this workshop, participants gained hands-on experience and a deeper understanding within the realm of Digital Twin representation in teaching.
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VPH Institute Membership
The University of Sydney is now an ordinary member of the VPH Institute, with the support of The Digital Sciences Initiative. The institute promotes, supports, and pursues not-for-profit scientific research and development on integrative biomedicine and related topics with the mission to ensure that the Virtual Physiological Human is fully realised, universally adopted, and effectively used both in research and clinics. More information on how to apply can be found here. For more information about the initiative to promote digital medicine please contact Prof. David Fletcher.
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Upcoming Events
DSI Seminar Series
- Machine learning with noisy labels
Presented by A/Prof. Tongliang Liu
Wednesday 14 Feb 2024, 12pm-1pm, Rm 277, Sydney Knowledge Hub
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If you wish to subscribe for further updates on DSI activities and events register here.
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