Grants and Awards
Dr Sarah Erfani receives Women in AI Award for Defence and Intelligence
Associate Professor Sarah Erfani, an ARC DECRA Fellow in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, has been awarded the 2024 Women in AI Award for ‘Defence and Intelligence’.
The award honours women in the Asia-Pacific region who are working, leading, researching, creating, or innovating in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Associate Professor Erfani also received a first runners-up award, which recognises the strength of her application. Associate Professor Erfani’s research in AI trustworthiness aims to enhance AI safety and reliability while addressing potential risks and uncertainties associated with AI Systems. Her efforts are focused on promoting transparency in AI systems and guaranteeing their accuracy, enabling stakeholders to trust and validate the reasoning behind AI-driven outcomes, and confidently use them in their daily tasks. More
Dr Fan Yang awarded 2023 ADM+S ECR Seed Funding Grant
Research Project: The Outsourced AI in the Global South: The data labelling industry, labour, and legislation
Abstract
The project explores the data labeling and annotation industry in the Global South, focusing on China. Data labeling in China is growing in significance, propelled by the country's booming AI industry, the Chinese National AI initiative, and American tech companies outsourcing low-skill technical labour to the Global South. Data labeling involves human training machines to classify and recognise images, audio, text, and other content to improve accuracy and efficiency that cannot otherwise be achieved by machines at their current status. This project will investigate the formation of the data labeling industry in China, data labelers and their experience at work, and how this type of labour is affected by domestic and cros jurisdictional laws on crowdsourcing and outsourcing. Information related to data labeling job advertisements, data labeler's experience, and relevant legislation will be collected from Chinese job-seeking websites, crowdsourcing platforms, and online forums for qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Prof Christine Parker, Prof Paula O'Brien, Prof Jeannie Paterson and Prof Kim Weatherall (University of Sydney) received 2023 Workshop Program funded by the Academy of Social Sciences Australia (ASSA)
Workshop title: Strategic Public Interest Litigation for Transparency and Accountability of Harmful Digital Marketing: A Researcher-Regulator-Community Dialogue
Melbourne Law School, 25 - 26 September 2023
Convenors: Prof Christine Parker FASSA, Prof Paula O’Brien, Prof Jeannie Paterson and Prof Kimberlee Weatherall
Abstract
Online advertising by digital platforms can be used by harmful industries such as alcohol, unhealthy food, and gambling to manipulate consumers, misrepresent their products, and engage in predatory conduct targeting people generally, and, in particular, groups experiencing vulnerability. These practices are difficult to investigate. Scholars, activists and regulators focusing on specific industries rarely have a chance to discuss their common challenges.
Report
Parker, C., O'Brien, P., Paterson, J. M., & Weatherall, K. (2024). Strategic Public Interest Litigation for Transparency and Accountability of Harmful Digital Marketing: A Researcher-Regulator-Community Dialogue. Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. https://doi.org/10.60651/1MVZ-VS12
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 ADM+S 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 ADM+S 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.