Reproducible Physical Science and the Declaratron

Invited Book ChapterThe Declaratron is a semantic engine for formalising mathematics and science in publication

Training days: models of vocational training provision

Few areas of Australian public policy have undergone such rapid change as vocational education and training (VET) in recent years. The introduction of private provision, known as ‘contestability’, has radically reshaped the VET sector. Contestability was first embraced in Victoria in 2009 in response to a widespread skills shortage, with other states since following suit. The objectives of contestability were to increase the supply of qualified trainees, while attracting greater private investment and improving quality through competition. In a 2008 paper, Per Capita called for a new market design in vocational training based on contestability (Cooney, 2008). Now, five years on, we evaluate the experience of contestability in Victoria against its original objectives. We find that it has succeeded in one of its primary goals: dramatically lifting the supply of new trainees. However, there have been unexpected and damaging consequences elsewhere. The ‘uncapping’ of the market has led to a bubble which has resulted in a $300m p.a. blow-out in public spending on VET. This type of bubble is common in sectors where public funds are newly made available to private providers – employment services and household solar energy systems are two recent examples. A related feature of such bubbles is that new entrants offer variable quality. In the case of VET, employer groups report falling confidence in the quality of skills delivered by the training system. The response of the Victorian Government to the blow-out has been to cut back annual spending by around$300m; these cuts have fallen largely on TAFEs, the traditional public training providers. We believe this is a detrimental step as it undermines TAFEs’ ability to deliver their statutory community service obligations which assist disadvantaged and disabled students. In addition, it weakens the financial viability of TAFEs, which is particularly concerning in thin regional markets poorly serviced by private training providers. Taken together, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. For the economic and social health of Australia, it is critical that we get this system of human capital investment right. While it is commendable that supply has increased and government has reined in overspending, Australia cannot afford to settle for declining quality in its training sector and the dilution of the distinctive community services offered by TAFEs. To address this situation, this report proposes four principles that should underpin the next stage in the market design of the VET sector in Victoria. First, we recommend the retention of uncapped public subsidies in skills shortage areas only. Capping should be returned in other areas. Secondly, we call for a streamlined subsidy structure which removes the extraordinary complexity of the current regime and delivers the highest subsidy to skills shortage areas courses. Thirdly, we demand the reinstatement of dedicated public funding to TAFEs to allow them to deliver their community service obligations. This could be paid for by tightening eligibility for Recognition of Prior Learning programs and foundational courses. Finally, we call for an independent Ombudsman to oversee the regulation of the sector. This role would replace the current undesirable structure in which government acts as purchaser, provider and regulator. We are confident these principles offer a sustainable, high quality future for the VET sector, both in Victoria and in the other states currently redesigning their training provision. Australian trainees and their employers deserve nothing less

An Open System for Social Computation

Part of the power of social computation comes from using the collective intelligence of humans to tame the aggregate uncertainty of (otherwise) low veracity data obtained from human and automated sources. We have witnessed a surge in development of social computing systems but, ironically, there have been few attempts to generalise across this activity so that creation of the underlying mechanisms themselves can be made more social. We describe a method for achieving this by standardising patterns of social computation via lightweight formal specifications (we call these social artifacts) that can be connected to existing internet architectures via a single model of computation. Upon this framework we build a mechanism for extracting provenance meta-data across social computations

Engineering Polymer Informatics

The poster describes a strategy of for the development of polymer informatics. In particular, the development of polymer markup language, a polymer ontology and natural language processing tools for polymer literature

Mining chemical information from Open patents

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract Linked Open Data presents an opportunity to vastly improve the quality of science in all fields by increasing the availability and usability of the data upon which it is based. In the chemical field, there is a huge amount of information available in the published literature, the vast majority of which is not available in machine-understandable formats. PatentEye, a prototype system for the extraction and semantification of chemical reactions from the patent literature has been implemented and is discussed. A total of 4444 reactions were extracted from 667 patent documents that comprised 10 weeks' worth of publications from the European Patent Office (EPO), with a precision of 78% and recall of 64% with regards to determining the identity and amount of reactants employed and an accuracy of 92% with regards to product identification. NMR spectra reported as product characterisation data are additionally captured.Peer Reviewe

ChemicalTagger: A tool for semantic text-mining in chemistry.

BACKGROUND: The primary method for scientific communication is in the form of published scientific articles and theses which use natural language combined with domain-specific terminology. As such, they contain free owing unstructured text. Given the usefulness of data extraction from unstructured literature, we aim to show how this can be achieved for the discipline of chemistry. The highly formulaic style of writing most chemists adopt make their contributions well suited to high-throughput Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches. RESULTS: We have developed the ChemicalTagger parser as a medium-depth, phrase-based semantic NLP tool for the language of chemical experiments. Tagging is based on a modular architecture and uses a combination of OSCAR, domain-specific regex and English taggers to identify parts-of-speech. The ANTLR grammar is used to structure this into tree-based phrases. Using a metric that allows for overlapping annotations, we achieved machine-annotator agreements of 88.9% for phrase recognition and 91.9% for phrase-type identification (Action names). CONCLUSIONS: It is possible parse to chemical experimental text using rule-based techniques in conjunction with a formal grammar parser. ChemicalTagger has been deployed for over 10,000 patents and has identified solvents from their linguistic context with >99.5% precision.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Embodied conversations: Performance and the design of a robotic dancing partner

This paper reports insights gained from an exploration of performance-based techniques to improve the design of relationships between people and responsive machines. It draws on the Emergent Objects project and specifically addresses notions of embodiment as employed in the field of performance as a means to prototype and develop a robotic agent, SpiderCrab, designed to promote expressive interaction of device and human dancer, in order to achieve ‘performative merging’. The significance of the work is to bring further knowledge of embodiment to bear on the development of human-technological interaction in general. In doing so, it draws on discursive and interpretive methods of research widely used in the field of performance but not yet obviously aligned with some orthodox paradigms and practices within design research. It also posits the design outcome as an ‘objectile’ in the sense that a continuous and potentially divergent iteration of prototypes is envisaged, rather than a singular final product. The focus on performative merging draws in notions of complexity and user experience. Keywords: Embodiment; Performance; Tacit Knowledge; Practice-As-Research; Habitus.</p

OSCAR4: a flexible architecture for chemical text-mining

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract The Open-Source Chemistry Analysis Routines (OSCAR) software, a toolkit for the recognition of named entities and data in chemistry publications, has been developed since 2002. Recent work has resulted in the separation of the core OSCAR functionality and its release as the OSCAR4 library. This library features a modular API (based on reduction of surface coupling) that permits client programmers to easily incorporate it into external applications. OSCAR4 offers a domain-independent architecture upon which chemistry specific text-mining tools can be built, and its development and usage are discussed.Peer Reviewe

Somatic drivers of B-ALL in a model of ETV6-RUNX1; Pax5(+/-) leukemia.

BACKGROUND: B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) is amongst the leading causes of childhood cancer-related mortality. Its most common chromosomal aberration is the ETV6-RUNX1 fusion gene, with ~25% of ETV6-RUNX1 patients also carrying PAX5 alterations. METHODS: We have recreated this mutation background by inter-crossing Etv6-RUNX1 (Etv6 (RUNX1-SB)) and Pax5(+/-) mice and performed an in vivo analysis to find driver genes using Sleeping Beauty transposon-mediated mutagenesis and also exome sequencing. RESULTS: Combination of Etv6-RUNX1 and Pax5(+/-) alleles generated a transplantable B220 + CD19+ B-ALL with a significant disease incidence. RNA-seq analysis showed a gene expression pattern consistent with arrest at the pre-B stage. Analysis of the transposon common insertion sites identified genes involved in B-cell development (Zfp423) and the JAK/STAT signaling pathway (Jak1, Stat5 and Il2rb), while exome sequencing revealed somatic hotspot mutations in Jak1 and Jak3 at residues analogous to those mutated in human leukemias, and also mutation of Trp53. CONCLUSIONS: Powerful synergies exists in our model suggesting STAT pathway activation and mutation of Trp53 are potent drivers of B-ALL in the context of Etv6-RUNX1;Pax5(+/-)