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Decoding Big Data

Check out this story from the UTS news room, featuring some of our UTS data scientists, including CIC Director, Simon Buckingham Shum. Key points: Humans have been surrounded by data since the beginning of history, but what’s different today is that the rate at which data is now being created and stored is exponential Experts say a re-imagining of data could see societies move away from one-size-fits-all approaches and towards more tailored solutions for education, finance, sustainab...
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Open Source Writing Analytics

   CIC has released its Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) infrastructure open source. THE CHALLENGE. CIC initiated its Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) project in 2015, as it became clear through consultations across faculties that student writing was a strategically important area for UTS teaching and learning (and indeed, for most other educational institutions). The possibility of providing instant, personalised, actionable feedback to students about their drafts, 24/7, is a compelling one. ...
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Telling better educational stories with data visualisation

As we drown in information, "dashboards" have become pervasive, but how we present the information to the end user is a challenge. Dashboards are often too complex with users bombarded with information that may not be relevant. Let’s take education as an example, where dashboards are being designed to help students with different aspects of their learning, for example,  managing time effectively, accessing key learning resources, or gaining a richer picture of their progress.   But here's the p...
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Can imperfect AI improve student learning?

The narrative about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often that it will improve society by helping to remove human error from complex systems beyond our ken. There is no doubt that in some cases this is true: self-driving cars will help to decrease traffic accidents; google translate has made it surprisingly easy to read texts from other languages; and AI driven image recognition already far surpasses humans when it comes to the diagnosis of cancer. All of these technologies rely upon the assumpt...
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Towards Instant Writing Feedback for PhD students

How can AI help PhD students get their work published? A key to this is that they learn, through extensive practice, how to make the hallmark ‘moves’ that reviewers are looking for when assessing a paper. However, there is extensive evidence showing that students struggle to grasp these, and that supervisors are not always expert in coaching this even though they are themselves clearly able to write in this way. In CIC’s Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) project, we are tuning the AcaWriter web ...
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Do students value automated feedback on their writing?

All students are used to software keeping an eye on their spelling, grammar and signs of plagiarism. They’re also very familiar with the idea that computers can understand complex, everyday speech or writing, as mobile phones and Google adverts are clearly able to interpret such “natural language” (as it is called in computer science). If they have ever tried to learn to speak or write a foreign language, they may well have used online tools to get instant feedback and coaching. So, on the one ...
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Analytics Innovation and Impact

EDUCAUSE Review is one of the most influential IT/Education leadership publications. The current edition showcases the UTS strategic leadership that led to the hybrid innovation/impact centre that is CIC: Buckingham Shum, S.J. and McKay, T.A. (2018), Architecting for Learning Analytics: Innovating for Sustainable Impact. EDUCAUSE Review, March/April 2018, pp. 25-37. In the article, CIC's Director compares notes with his opposite number at the University of Michigan, who runs the Digital Inno...
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Meet CIC’s Data Scientist

CIC’s Data Scientist, Mike Pracy, is available to consult with you on how you can 'do data' better, faster, smarter.  Mike's background is in Physics and Astronomy research. He has a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of New South Wales and has held research positions in Universities and Astronomical Observatories. He has primarily worked on better understanding distant galaxies and Cosmology with a particular focus on the role played by 'super-massive' black holes. Much of his work involv...
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Replay: Humans, Data, AI and Ethics

  Data is transforming the way we live, work and play. From transportation, to health, education and entertainment, data-driven technologies could help us solve critical global challenges and build more efficient, sustainable societies. As computational capacities expand, the potential to radically improve human productivity and efficiency is exciting to many. At the same time, there’s a growing need to interrogate the ways in which we generate, analyse and utilise data, to ensure soci...
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CIC welcomes writing analytics Endeavour Scholar

Rianne Conijn recently arrived at CIC from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. She follows Bikalpa Neupane as the second PhD student to win an Australian Government Endeavour Scholarship, spending 5 months contributing her expertise to CIC’s work, and learning from the team here. Rianne, welcome to CIC! Can you tell us a bit about yourself – where did you grow up, and how did you get interested in computing? Hi, my name is Rianne Conijn. I grew up in a small town north of Amsterdam,...
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