E-RESEARCH GROUP
The Melbourne eResearch Group (MEG) under the leadership of Professor Richard Sinnott supports the development, support and delivery of research-oriented IT systems to a wide range of research communities at the University of Melbourne.We provide research-oriented software engineering using a combination of the current bleeding edge technologies through to more tried and trusted software solutions. Key to our success is the adoption of rapid prototyping processes and solutions that ultimately lead to highly robust systems that meet the needs of the customers we serve. Indeed we pride ourselves on being able to develop systems faster and more robustly than other folks. It is what we do – day-in and day-out! We are also highly agile in our approach. Research rarely follows a predictable software development trajectory.
WE DELIVER AND SUPPORT RESEARCH-ORIENTED IT SYSTEMS
to a wide range of research communities at the University of Melbourne
OUR SKILLS
We provide research-oriented software engineering using a combination of the current bleeding edge technologies through to more tried and trusted software solutions. Key to our success is the adoption of rapid prototyping processes and solutions that ultimately lead to highly robust systems that meet the needs of the customers we serve. Indeed we pride ourselves on being able to develop systems faster and more robustly than other folks. It is what we do – day-in and day-out! We are also highly agile in our approach. Research rarely follows a predictable software development trajectory. Researchers and communities change their minds, new opportunities and obstacles arise, and all of these things can jeopardise the successful delivery of software systems. We have lived in this kind of ecosystem for over 15 years and have never failed to deliver working IT systems. Many of these have gone truly global with thousands of users and now used as the platform for millions of dollars of research funding.
MEG STATISTIC
The success story of e-Research Group. In facts & numbers.
OUR PROJECTS
Some wonderful projects we delivered or involved in.
BetterBrains has been funded by NHMRC to establish a web based platform to address the hypothesis that a person-centred, multi-domain lifestyle intervention can slow cognitive decline over a 3-year follow-up period. This is a major collaboration lead by the Florey Institute and builds on projects such as ORCA.
Victorian Flu Surveillance Extension has been funded by the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne to enhance a platform support surveillance of flu outbreaks across Victoria. This system is to be used by GPs to record patients with flu and/or flu-like systems.
Early environmental determinants of pancreatic islet autoimmunity: a pregnancy to early life cohort study in children at risk of type-1 diabetes (ENDIA) extension was funded by JDRF to establish an infrastructure for collecting information on pregnant women at risk of having children that go on to develop type-1 diabetes. This project extends the work for a further year.
Supporting the School of Psychological Sciences (extension) has been funded to support the research-oriented IT needs of the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. This includes development of mobile applications and web applications/databases.
Generic Athena is a commercial project funded by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) that runs to May 2020. The focus of this work is in extensions and refinements of a scheduling system for training and tracking of resource personnel required by the defence forces of Australia. This will provide an Australia-wide system that can support current and future training needs and demands of defence personnel in the army, navy and airforce. This work also includes support for mobile applications.
School of Computing and Information Systems Teaching and Learning Support (SCIS) extension is a project to extend a range of applications supporting the teaching and learning needs of the School of Computing and Information Systems. This includes mobile applications; web applications and back end databases.
Early environmental determinants of pancreatic islet autoimmunity: a pregnancy to early life cohort study in children at risk of type-1 diabetes (ENDIA) was funded by JDRF to establish an infrastructure for collecting information on pregnant women at risk of having children that go on to develop type-1 diabetes. This project extends the work for a further year.
Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) Agility fund is focused on extending the AURIN platform through a server upgrade; a second deployment of the e-Infrastructure on the NeCTAR Research Cloud to provide increased reliability and redundancy of systems; supporting big data solutions including high velocity and high volume data sets such as streaming data (traffic, weather, social media), and development of mobile applications that leverage the open API that has been developed.
Australian Diabetes Data Network Phase II (ADDN2) has been funded ($2m) by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) to extend the existing ADDN system (see below) to other paediatric and adult hospitals across Australia. This project runs to end of December 2018 and will include data feeds from over 20 hospitals across Australia. PRESS are the primary software developers that have established the national registry that includes data from a multitude of hospitals. Unlike other systems, this data does not require manual data entry. Rather, data is extracted from hospital systems directly and integrated into the national registry that is hosted at the University of Melbourne. This work supports both the Australian Diabetes Society (ADS) and the Australian Paediatric Endocrine Group (APEG) .
Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) is a large national project ($30m) funded by the federal government Department of Education (it was formerly funded by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science (also formerly known as DIISRTE/DIISR) through the Education Investment Fund (EIF) and the National Collaboration Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) activities. The PRESS team are responsible for the development, integration and support of the associated infrastructure. This provides single-on, secure programmatic access to over 2000 live and typically definitive data sets from many major organisations across Australia including the likes of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Department of Health Victorias and many others. A unique feature of AURIN is that (wherever possible) it provides access to remote data sets rather than seek to establish a local data warehouse. The system has almost 3000 regular users.
Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment (GEODE): was funded by ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and began in October 2005. The intention of GEODE was to develop an e-Infrastructure to facilitate the processing of occupational data from social survey and related outputs. This include the generation and provision of automated data confrontation and management programs which allow lay users to understand and link their ‘raw’ data with a variety of sociological occupational classification schemes; the development of a virtual network acting as an international ‘depository’ of occupational information; and the exploration of operations which may facilitate the further computation of occupationally based social classification schemes for new versions of international occupational data. The GEODE project benefits this proposal in numerous ways including experiences in developing e-Infrastructures for a non-IT savvy research community; dealing with federated data access; user interface design including portal technologies, and support for development and roll out of e-Security solutions. An example paper from GEODE is available here.
Enhancing Repositories for Language and Literature Researchers (ENROLLER): the ENROLLER project was funded for 2-years in 2009 by JISC. It focused on the development of a virtual research environment for language and literature researchers. The system provided seamless access to a range of distributed language and literature data sets. Many of these data sets were under strict license conditions, e.g. the commercially available Oxford English Dictionary. The work of ENROLLER included large-scale data integration techniques and fine-grained security offered through user-friendly portals. An example paper from ENROLLER is available here.
ESP-Grid was based on collaboration with the University of Oxford. The work focused on development of a demonstrator showing how Shibboleth could be used for access to and usage of Grid services. This included support for linkage of Shibboleth and services with advanced authorisation infrastructures to support single sign-on across multiple consortium clinical resources. A paper describing the outputs of ESP-Grid is given here.
The ShinTau project focused on secure access to web resources through Shibboleth and use of multiple attribute authorities. This might be through deciding to allow access to a particular data set only if multiple separate roles exist from multiple sites for example. A paper describing the outputs of ShinTau is given here.
A Proxy Credential Auditing Infrastructure (PCAI): focused on the tracking and usage of digital resources (auditing) by distributed individuals using X509 based digital certificates. This work showed how fine grained provenance information could be captured, identifying which individuals made which requests to access which resources. A paper describing the outputs of PCAI is given here.
OUR NEWS
Continually productize performance based portals and granular mindshare. Proactively myocardinate enterprise-wide infomediaries whereas accurate leadership skills.
UPCOMING EVENTS
L. Morandini, S. Winter, R.O. Sinnott, Correctness Comparison of Open-weight and Proprietary LLMs for Spatial Tasks, 2024 IEEE International Conference…
X. Wang, H. Yu, Y. Chen, R.O. Sinnott, Z. Yang, PrVFL: Pruning-Aware Verifiable Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Edge Computing, IEEE…
G. Jayaputera, R.O. Sinnott, MTP: A Cloud-based Real-time Mobile Tele-medicine Platform for Australia – Systems Paper, IEEE e-Science 2024, Osaka,…
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