News

Congratulations to CIC research fellow, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado who has been awarded a National Researcher Level 1 by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), Mexico for the period 2017-2019. This includes the admission to the National Research System (SNI) which facilitates access to further sources of funding and will allow Roberto to be more involved in a number of initiatives. Becoming a member of the SNI is a very competitive endeavour. It requires the researcher to p...
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UTS Senior Lecturer in Data Science, Kailash Awati has jointly released his second “Heretics Guide” management book called The Heretics Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity. Which looks at how ambiguity affects human behaviour and how managers can harness it in positive ways. Management techniques such as strategic planning, project management or operational budgeting, attempt to reduce ambiguity and provide clarity, however they often end up missing the point. So why do mana...
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Students studying the UTS Master of Data Science and Innovation (MDSI) degree have once again achieved amazing success with their latest hackathon challenge at Unearthed Sydney over the weekend. Over 30 MDSI students in 8 different teams competed against other universities and professional companies and after five challenges took out ALL three cash awards! This included first prize, tied second, as well as the Young Innovators Award. The team who were awarded first prize of $2000 as well as cre...
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Key Technology Partner (KTP) Visiting Fellowship Program awarded one of CIC’s research fellows, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado with a grant to fund, Mykola Pechenizkiy a Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology to travel to UTS and CIC in February 2017. Mykola is one of the leading researchers in Educational Data Mining (President of the International EDM Society).This funding seeks to develop long-term collaboration with UTS and CIC and Eindhoven University and to explore opportunities for ...
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Ongoing work on the Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) tool is being conducted. Ethics clearance has been granted for researchers to collaborate with academics to analyse historic essays, resulting in a corpus of (cleaned and anonymized) essays from science, law, and accounting subjects. This provides a baseline for intervention work in law and accounting (VCLT supported) to investigate (a) the effectiveness of AWA in supporting students understanding of the assessment criteria through a benchma...
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Last week CIC's Simon Knight attended the 12th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) in Singapore. The conference theme "Transforming Learning, Empowering Learners" brought a focus onto design features of pedagogy and the empowerment of students to design their own social futures through participation in their global world. The conference brought together practitioners and researchers with interests in instruction and learning as well as learning technologies and learning anal...
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Over recent months, CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum has developed a series of invited seminars at Queensland University of Technology, University of South Australia, University College London and The Open University UK, exploring ethical issues surrounding the application of data science in education — learning analytics. See his blog post for details, replay from UCL below.
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The Master of Data Science and Innovation (MDSI) is now in its 2nd year and is proving to be a flagship program of study in UTS’ strategy to be a leading university of technology. Taking a trans-disciplinary approach, the MDSI utilises a range of perspectives from diverse fields and integrates them with industry experiences, real-world projects and self-directed study, equipping graduates with an understanding of the potential of analytics to transform practice. MDSI is a unique course that ai...
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CIC has recently launched a new strand which focuses on making visible how people work in teams, both face-to-face and online. This is led by Educational Data Scientist Roberto Martinez-Maldonado, who joined us in September 2015. He brings expertise in the use of technologies that can detect what is happening in face-to-face meetings, such as Kinect sensors to differentiate learner’s actions, microphone arrays to capture who is speaking when, and multitouch surfaces. Roberto and the CIC team ...
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An MDSI student perspective on attending the NASA Space APP Hackathon By Anthony So What is a Hackathon? A hackathon is an event where the participants collaborate to tackle some problems and challenges set by the organiser. This kind of event is getting more and more popular across the globe. Corporations, governments or NGOs have seen the benefits in organising these competitions. First it is a good opportunity for them to create some buzz around their organisations, secondly they can find tal...
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