Trans-Pacific Fellowship Award for Prof. Jane Hunter

4 January 2011
Prof. Jane Hunter has been awarded a 2010 Trans-Pacific Fellowship to visit the University of Washington, USA. Prof. Hunter follows an invitation from Prof. Harry Bruce who is Dean of the Information School where Prof. Hunter will be undertaking her work as Visiting Professor from June to August this year.

The Trans-Pacific Fellowships (TPF) is an initiative between the University of Queensland (UQ) and the University of Washington (UW), supporting high-quality strategic research exchanges for UQ staff and students. The initiative encourages the development of permanent personal and institutional friendships, as well as the pooling of expertise and resources to derive better research results.

Prof. Hunter is leading the e-Research Group within the School of ITEE – the focus of which is to develop innovative scientific data management and analysis tools. A rapidly growing area of interest across many disciplines is 'citizen science', whereby members of the public contribute potentially valuable and unique data to scientific programs. Prof. Hunter is developing tools to improve the quality and reliability of citizen science data, and she has recently published a number of papers on this topic.

As UW hosts the NatureMapping Foundation – a global citizen science project, collecting community-generated data about biodiversity and phenology – this valuable dataset will provide an ideal testbed for Prof. Hunter's research.

Prof. Hunter will be working with colleagues from UW and Microsoft Research (Redmond, Seattle). The project has the potential to generate a new technological framework that will redefine the paradigm of environmental monitoring and data veracity. It will build new relationships, and expand on existing relationships between the UQ School of ITEE and the UW Information School, the UW Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the UW eScience Institute, and between UQ and Microsoft Research. It will also enable the sharing of knowledge and methodologies between the UQ CoralWatch Project and the UW NatureMapping Foundation.

Undoubtedly, this will lead to further scholarly exchanges, collaborative publications and joint grant applications between the UQ School of ITEE and the UW Information School, as well as between UQ and UW more widely.

2010 News

Visiting Fellow – Confucius Institute 25 August 2010 Congratulations to Dr Yuan-Fang Li, Research Fellow, who has been awarded a short-term researchfellowship to China to visit Tianjin University. The fellowship is facilitated by the UQ's Confucius Institute which supports, facilitates and initiates collaborations between UQ and Chinese universities.

Three-Minute Thesis Competition 23 August 2010 Congratulations to David (Chih-Hao) Yu for winning the School of ITEE final in the three-minute thesis competition for his presentation on "Rich Annotations for 3-D Digital Museum Artefacts". David now goes on to compete in the Faculty finals. Good luck David!