UTS Provost and Senior Vice-President Vicki Chen visits for a showcase of AAII’s research excellence.
Photo Credit: Mengjia Wu.
AAII turns Six
On the week marking the six year anniversary of its inception, UTS Provost and Senior Vice-President Vicki Chen visited AAII. Since its inauguration as the Centre for Artificial Intelligence on 31 March 2017, AAII has become Australia’s leading AI research facility. Its 2020 transformation into The Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute spotlights its premiere position in the nation’s AI landscape.
Provost Vicki Chen’s address focused on AAII’s contribution to UTS’ broader strategic vision as a world-leading university of technology recognised for its global impact. AAII is uniquely placed to drive UTS 2027 through its portfolio of projects and demonstrated research excellence.
Provost and Senior Vice President Vicki Chen addresses AAII. Photo credit: Mengjia Wu.
The Provost spoke of the evolving higher education sector landscape, focusing on AAII’s leadership structure, with early and middle career researchers receiving strong guidance from AAII’s leadership team, demonstrating AAII’s commitment to responsible leadership.
AAII’s Director Distinguished Professor Jie Lu AO presented AAII’s achievements, with more than 50 partners in universities, government departments and industry groups, 1,300 high-impact publications, the supervision of 200+ PhD students, and a total research income of $33 million, and identified focus areas to build on these accomplishments for the year ahead.
Staff showcased AAII's research excellence and its real world translation, with presentations demonstrating the breadth of impact across sectors ranging from healthcare, to HR and employment, and defence.
Minh Nguyen presents prototype of bionic visual prosthesis for the blind (CRC-P). Photo credit: Mengjia Wu.
Healthcare
Bionic visual-spatial prosthesis for the blind (CRC-P) presented by CT Lin
Distinguished Professor CT Lin and his team are developing a spatial audio and sensory perception system that can map unknown and complex environments for the visually impaired, presenting a working prototype of the device to the Provost.
Biomedical data science presented presented by Paul Kennedy
Virtual reality observations of oncology models developed in collaboration with The Children's Hospital at Westmead can predict cancer subtypes from stained tissue images and create cancer treatment maps.
Jing Jiang, 2023 ARC DECRA, presented on AAII's inclusivity models to support research excellence by female academics. Photo credit: Mengjia Wu.
Employment and HR
Predictive people analytics presented by Farookh Hussain
A data-driven and privacy-aware approach for insights on employee churn, translated into practice by ELMO with an accuracy of 1% difference between real data and modelled data to predict a churn rate of 6%.
Defence
Drone detection presented by Nabin Sharma
The Intelligent Drone Lab, in collaboration with ASX listed defence tech company DroneShield, has produced a computer vision based Drone Detection system using Deep Learning to better identify threats from aggressive off-the-shelf unmanned aerial systems (UASs).
Brain robot interface (BRI) presented by Nguyen Tien Thong Do
The BRI system is a seamless Mixed Reality (MX) interface that utilises AI technology to translate brainwaves into actionable commands by machines, entirely handsfree, developed in collaboration with the Defence Innovation Hub.
The Provost's visit to AAII reveals that the ever growing implementation of AAII research across industries has a pivotal role to play in UTS' trajectory in the years to come.