Grants and Awards
Dr Sarah Monazam Erfani awarded 2022 ARC DECRA Fellow
Research Project: Making Anomaly Detection Interpretable & Actionable in Hostile Environments
Project Summary
Anomaly detection plays a vital role in cyber security to identify threat patterns hidden within large volumes of data. However, current approaches experience high false alarm rates in noisy, heterogeneous and adversarial environments. This project aims to identify and interpret anomalies that can disrupt system performance by introducing the concept of actionable anomalies. It will significantly advance the effectiveness of anomaly detection by developing algorithms that distil local and global structures of data to characterise actionable anomalies and explain their outlying aspects. Project outcomes will enhance the security, trustworthiness and fault-tolerance of critical systems, contributing to international efforts in cyber security.
Dr Jake Goldenfein received 2021 ECR Seed Funding Grant
Research Project: Precarious warehouse work and the automation of logistical mobilities: Understanding Amazon in the Australian context
Project Lead: Dr Chris O’Neill (also includes Jake Goldenfein, Thao Phan, Lauren Kelly, Jathan Sadowski)
Project Summary
This will be the first academic research project to analyse Amazon’s Australian ‘fulfilment centres’. We will study how automated mobility technologies are being deployed in Amazon’s new warehouses alongside other automated management and worker monitoring tools. Our research will combine interviews with warehouse workers and members of the communities proximate to Amazon’s Australian warehouses, alongside analysis of Amazon’s Australian corporate strategy and technology implementation, and a review of relevant workplace surveillance laws. The project will produce an integrated analysis of the use of automated mobility technologies alongside other automated management techniques, with a view towards developing recommendations for the responsible and ethical development of automated systems and sustainable labour practices, as well as canvassing the possibility of reform in Victoria’s workplace privacy regime.
Dr Anjalee de Silva received 2021 ECR Seed Funding Grant
Research Project: Gendered Harms Online: Conceptualising, Identifying, and Addressing Harms to Women on Digital Platforms
Project co-Lead: Dr Rosalie Gillett
Project Summary
Anjalee de Silva has been awarded funding as part of the Centre’s most recent ECR Seed Funding round to conduct a workshop on ‘Gendered Harms Online: Conceptualising, Identifying, and Addressing Harms to Women on Digital Platforms’. Anjalee will be leading this project with Rosalie Gillett, who is a Research Fellow at the Centre’s QUT node. The virtual workshop is to be held in November 2021 and will bring together academic, civil society, and industry participants to discuss how gendered online harms are conceived of, regulated, and responded to by platforms and to investigate ways that automated interventions might better address or mitigate such harms. Analysis of the data collected through the workshop will be published and will assist with the development of an online research tool that will summarise and visually represent conceptualisations of gendered online harms and platforms’ responses to them. A primary focus of the workshop and its outputs will be to ‘map’ the gaps between scholarly and civil society perceptions of the harms to women of relevant online communicative conduct and platforms’ conceptions and regulation of and responses to such conduct. Both the article and the online tool will inform Anjalee’s broader research project ‘Democracy, Vilification, and Automated Regulation’. Anjalee is also currently working on some co-authored papers that are relevant to that broader project, including a paper with Andrew Kenyon on hate speech and positive free speech and a paper with Christine Parker on online vilification against women and platform regulation. As part of her work with the Centre, Anjalee has additionally made several recent policy submissions relating to the regulation of vilification against women, including submissions to the Facebook Oversight Board on Facebook’s Hate Speech Community Standard and related cases.