Developing and resourcing academics to help students conduct and communicate undergraduate research on a large scale. Final Report 2016.

This report describes\ua0a\ua0significant national-level educational initiative that involved 39 academic colleagues. The project has changed the face of laboratory education for thousands of Australian students

Simulating an Immune Response with a Combined Agent-Based Model of a Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Tumor and Vascular Network

Cytotoxic T-cells (CTLs) are one mechanism the immune system employs to eliminate cancer cells. In this study, I expand upon a previous 3-dimmensional agent-based model of triple-negative breast cancer to include a therapy simulating an immune response in the form of a CTL insertion into the tumor. The model consists of the tumor, comprised of progenitor cells, cancer stem cells, and tumor-associated macrophages, as well as an expanding vascular network. I investigate the effects of inserting different amounts of CTLs into the space, and their effect on tumor size in the short and longer terms. The results show that while CTLs decrease the size of the tumor they are ineffective at completely eliminating it, leading to continued tumor proliferation in the aftermat

Update on the CubeSat Program of the National Science Foundation

Since 2008, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has provided grant funding for over a dozen university-led cubesat missions for scientific research and STEM education. The aims of the NSF cubesat program are to advance observations for space weather, atmospheric and geospace sciences as well as technology development in aerospace engineering and radiocommunications, and to provide “out of this world” leadership opportunities for university students in space missions. This presentation by the NSF Program Director managing the cubesat portfolio will provide an update on the NSF cubesat program

Australian innovation system report 2013

Australian innovation and engagement with Asia is the theme of the Australian Innovation System Report 2013, the fourth in a series of Australian Government reports on the Australian innovation system. The core message of this report is that the rise of Asia presents many opportunities for Australia beyond the resources sectors. Seizing these opportunities will require an economy that is flexible, resilient and embraces market diversification. To achieve this, the comparative advantage of Australia’s proximity to Asia needs to be complemented with its competitive advantages in innovation and better knowledge of Asian markets. This report continues, where possible, to update indicators established in previous reports and add new insightful indicators that show trends in the innovation system. Many of these indicators benchmark Australia’s innovation performance against other countries, primarily Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries

Farm Fresh Healthcare Project: How-To Guide

The Farm Fresh Healthcare Project is the result of a collaboration between the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) and Health Care Without Harm (HCWH). This How-To Guide presents insights from the Farm Fresh Healthcare Project in hopes of providing guidance for other farm-to-institution initiatives. It is written as lessons learned rather than as a set of direct instructions since all local purchasing initiatives are unique based on the region they are located in and on the partners involved. This guide is based on a series of eleven interviews with project participants conducted by Health Care Without Harm, quantitative data reflecting the project's progress, and the expertise of the coordinating staff

Engineering Education for High-Ability Students

Over the course of their careers, engineers command a breadth and depth of knowledge from science, mathematics, society, politics, and economics that is needed for continuously updating their knowledge of the latest discoveries and advances. Driven by curiosity and enabled by rapid information technology, engineers are kept abreast of the latest advancements almost instantaneously. Today’s scientific knowledge is fluid and complex, yet these traits of engineering remain constant: the ability to define structure, plan, repeatedly evaluate, and align results to the initial objective. Engineering teachers need to facilitate their students’ ability to access information effectively and to apply it appropriately, as well as to foster a strong foundation in science and mathematics. Skill development in creativity, communication, and business acumen is the hallmark of an effective engineering education program and curriculum

Article Segmentation in Digitised Newspapers

Digitisation projects preserve and make available vast quantities of historical text. Among these, newspapers are an invaluable resource for the study of human culture and history. Article segmentation identifies each region in a digitised newspaper page that contains an article. Digital humanities, information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP) applications over digitised archives improve access to text and allow automatic information extraction. The lack of article segmentation impedes these applications. We contribute a thorough review of the existing approaches to article segmentation. Our analysis reveals divergent interpretations of the task, and inconsistent and often ambiguously defined evaluation metrics, making comparisons between systems challenging. We solve these issues by contributing a detailed task definition that examines the nuances and intricacies of article segmentation that are not immediately apparent. We provide practical guidelines on handling borderline cases and devise a new evaluation framework that allows insightful comparison of existing and future approaches. Our review also reveals that the lack of large datasets hinders meaningful evaluation and limits machine learning approaches. We solve these problems by contributing a distant supervision method for generating large datasets for article segmentation. We manually annotate a portion of our dataset and show that our method produces article segmentations over characters nearly as well as costly human annotators. We reimplement the seminal textual approach to article segmentation (Aiello and Pegoretti, 2006) and show that it does not generalise well when evaluated on a large dataset. We contribute a framework for textual article segmentation that divides the task into two distinct phases: block representation and clustering. We propose several techniques for block representation and contribute a novel highly-compressed semantic representation called similarity embeddings. We evaluate and compare different clustering techniques, and innovatively apply label propagation (Zhu and Ghahramani, 2002) to spread headline labels to similar blocks. Our similarity embeddings and label propagation approach substantially outperforms Aiello and Pegoretti but still falls short of human performance. Exploring visual approaches to article segmentation, we reimplement and analyse the state-of-the-art Bansal et al. (2014) approach. We contribute an innovative 2D Markov model approach that captures reading order dependencies and reduces the structured labelling problem to a Markov chain that we decode with Viterbi (1967). Our approach substantially outperforms Bansal et al., achieves accuracy as good as human annotators, and establishes a new state of the art in article segmentation. Our task definition, evaluation framework, and distant supervision dataset will encourage progress in the task of article segmentation. Our state-of-the-art textual and visual approaches will allow sophisticated IR and NLP applications over digitised newspaper archives, supporting research in the digital humanities

Growing Gardens and Nurturing Community in the Urban Environment

The following literature will analyze how urban agriculture (UA), and more specifically community gardens, address the rising global pressures on urban areas by rebuilding local networks. First, it will present community gardening as a solution to the global food crisis. Second, five case studies will compare cities’ community garden projects throughout the world: Accra, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Havana, and Philadelphia. The next section will study the demographics of community gardeners, especially its impacts on marginalized members of society: children, women, elderly, immigrants and ethnic minorities, and physical and mentally challenged. And finally, the issues of city planning and green design will highlight community gardens’ role in the creation of sustainable and engaged, civic communities. The cookbook anthology that follows will examine these research conclusions, specifically UA’s ability to rebuild local networks. Through histories, community stories, and gathered soup recipes, it will detail the programs of Southside Community Land Trust in Providence, Rhode Island: City Farm, Education: After-school, Urban Edge Farm, and Somerset Community Garden. Conversations with the staff will then study the avenues for social change through UA and the need for civic leadership