Author: Editorial Board

CSIRO has announced the appointment of Dr Bronwyn Harch as chief of its newest research division with a focus on data-driven computational and information sciences.

The new research division, CSIRO Computational Informatics (CCI), will work in partnership with the organisation’s National Research Flagship program to address key national challenges across the information and decision making value chain. It will also work closely with a range of external partners and collaborators to create a capability hub in key research areas including next generation data analytics, autonomous robotics, complex systems modelling, and decision making under uncertainty.

“From pioneering the development of digital image analysis for agriculture in the 1980s to securing the landmark patent to Wireless LAN technology in the 1990s, CSIRO has always been at the forefront of technology-related research which tackles the nation’s toughest challenges,” said Dr Harch.

“The proliferation of smart devices and increasing access to next generation broadband has caused an explosion in the volume, velocity and variety of data and information. With predictions, that by 2020 the average person will own six different smart devices[1] connecting us to over 37 billion ‘things’, from cows in the field to our car to our fridge door through the Internet[2], it is clear the amount of data we produce will continue to grow at an exponential rate,” said Dr Harch.

“We have responded to the information and data challenges facing Australia with the formation of this new CSIRO Computational Informatics (CCI) Division. Our integrated and strengthened capabilities in this division will enable us to remain at the forefront of global developments in key research areas that transform the information and decision making workflows of industry, government and the innovation sectors.”

A recent McKinsey Institute report[3] on the future of ‘disruptive technologies’ shows a reduced focus on new gadgets and gizmos and an increased emphasis on the impact of technologies which require advanced data analytics. The same report predicts that by 2025 the potential economic contribution of new disruptive technologies such as mobile Internet, advanced robotics and 3D printing are expected to return between $14 trillion and $33 trillion globally each year.

Dr Harch believes the new Division’s focus on data-driven science will help CSIRO to increase the economic and social well-being of the nation by tackling some of the biggest challenges facing Australia including our declining productivity and ageing population.

“Through our Preventative Health Flagship, we are already leading the way in transforming advanced data analytics to pinpoint the genes that could lead to a simple blood screening test for Alzheimer’s disease before it takes hold. We’re also working on another project, with our Digital Productivity and Services Flagship and Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI), which leverages next generation broadband networks to monitor health data and help older Australians to live in their own homes longer, independently and safely.”

However, it’s not just the healthcare industry reaping the rewards from this explosion of data. In an impressive debut, research from the CSIRO Computational Informatics Division has earned a staggering 13 nominations across multiple categories from environmental science to the services industries at this year’s iAwards, Australia’s premier technology accolades.

These projects include:

• Zebedee: a handheld 3D mapping device which doesn’t rely on GPS and can be used underground or inside buildings.
• ReMoTe: allows a remote expert to guide in real-time an onsite technician using gestures and voice to increase productivity and assist in up-skilling the workforce.
• Smarter, Safer Homes: a platform which uses home sensors and video conferencing to support older Australians to live in their own homes safely and independently.
• Environmental Linked Data: which produced Australia’s first set of open-linked long-term climate data.
• Sense-T Aquaculture Decision Support System: a platform which helps to ensure public food safety by supplying the Tasmanian Shellfish Quality Assurance Program with real-time environmental awareness to simplify decisions regarding when to close shellfish farms.
• Patient Flow Research: analytics to predict requirements and optimise configurations for hospital beds.
• Automated Disease Grading and Clinical Decision Support: an automatic disease grading and clinical decision support system for diabetic retinopathy level grading.
• Computer-aided Ocular Biomarker Suite: an eye test for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease 15-20 years before diagnosis is usually possible.
• SensorDB Virtual Laboratory: used for storing, analysing and looking for patterns in distributed sensor data for plant phenomics in the field. This work received two Australian Capital Territory categories iAwards.
• Medtex: a software platform that unifies the language across narrative medical reports and extracts clinically relevant information to aid decision support.
• Lung Anatomy Trainer (eLAnT): a web-based program that uses an online lung anatomy and nomenclature training tool for teaching the complex and variable human lung anatomy seen from a fibre-optic inspection tool.
• Starbug: Jeremy Breen, a University of Tasmania and CSIRO student, won a postgraduate tertiary award for autonomous analysis of marine sediment chemistry using an underwater robot.

The winners of this year’s iAwards will be announced during a ceremony in Melbourne on 8^th August 2013.

For more information about the CSIRO Computational Informatics Division please visit www.csiro.au/cci.

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Warming oceans are impacting the breeding patterns and habitat of marine life, effectively re-arranging the broader marine landscape as species adjust to a changing climate, according to a three-year international study published today in Nature Climate Change.

The international team led by CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship and University of Queensland marine ecologists Elvira Poloczanska and Anthony Richardson, based their findings on a review of peer-reviewed literature from around the world, identifying more than 1 700 changes, including 222 in Australia.

CSIRO’s Dr Poloczanska said marine species are shifting their geographic distribution towards cooler regions and doing so much faster than their land-based counterparts.

Despite the ocean having absorbed 80 per cent of the heat added to the global climate system, the ocean’s thermal capacity has led to surface waters warming three times slower than air temperatures over land.

“The leading edge or ‘front line’ of a marine species’ distribution is moving towards the poles at the average rate of 72 kilometres per decade, which is considerably faster than terrestrial species moving poleward at an average of six kilometres per decade,” said Dr Poloczanska.

“This is despite sea surface temperatures warming three times slower than land temperatures.”

Dr Poloczanska said winter and spring temperatures, over both the ocean and land, are warming fastest, which might advance phenological events such as the start of growing seasons and the timing of reproduction. In addition, anthropogenic carbon dioxide uptake by the oceans is altering seawater carbonate chemistry, which can impact some marine organisms.

“Given these findings, we expect marine organisms to have responded to recent climate change, with magnitudes similar to or greater than those found for terrestrial species,” she said.

The research team also considered changes in species’ life cycle, such as breeding times, to find these are also changing as seas warm.

Associate Professor Richardson explained that the timing of breeding and migration are, on average, occurring much earlier in the sea with marine species advancing by 4.4 days each decade which is also much faster than land based species which are breeding around 2.3 – 2.8 days earlier each decade.

Although the study reported global impacts, there is strong evidence of change in the Australian marine environment.

Dr Poloczanska said that in Australia’s south-east tropical and subtropical species of fish, molluscs and plankton are shifting much further south through the Tasman Sea. In the Indian Ocean, there is a southward distribution of sea birds as well as loss of cool-water seaweeds from regions north of Perth.

“Essentially, these findings indicate that changes in life events and distribution of species indicates we are seeing widespread reorganisation of marine ecosystems, with likely significant repercussions for the services these ecosystems provide to humans.

“For example, some of the favourite catches of recreational and commercial fishers are likely to decline, while other species, not previously in the area, could provide new fishing opportunities,” Dr Poloczanska said.

The international team included 19 researchers from Australia, USA, Canada, UK, Europe and South Africa.

Source and image: http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/Marine-life-spawns-sooner-as-oceans-warm.aspx

Acclaimed dairy expert and champion of leadership opportunities for women, Dr Anne Astin, has been officially announced as President of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology (AIFST).

Inducted last night for a two-year term at the 46th AIFST Convention in Brisbane, Dr Astin’s appointment follows two years as AIFST President Elect. Dr Astin is the former CEO of Dairy Food Safety Victoria, a leading government dairy authority, and has more than 20 years experience at a senior executive and board level. Outgoing President Jo Davey said that Dr Astin is passionate about food safety and maintaining Australia’s enviable food industry reputation. “She has been widely praised for her commitment to empowering people to reach their full potential – a dedication that aligns perfectly with AIFST’s most important role of supporting the professional development of its members,

CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope has detected brief flashes of radio emission from the distant Universe. Their origin is unknown.

CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia has detected mysterious ‘flashes’ of radio energy from the distant Universe that may open up a whole new area of astrophysics. The surprising finding, made by a team of scientists from ten institutions in Australia, the USA, UK, Germany and Italy, is published in today’s issue of the journal Science.

“Staggeringly, we estimate there could be one of these flashes going off every ten seconds somewhere in the sky,” said research team member Dr Simon Johnston, Head of Astrophysics at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.

Four flashes were detected, each from a different direction and each lasting for only a millisecond (a thousandth of a second).

The characteristics of the radio signal — how it is ‘smeared out’ in frequency from travelling through space — indicate that the flashes came from up to 11 billion light-years away.

No gamma rays or X-rays were detected in association with the flashes, and the astronomers have ruled out the flashes being from phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts, the merger of two neutron stars, merging black holes, or evaporating black holes.

Dan Thornton, a PhD student with the University of Manchester and CSIRO, is the lead author on the Science paper. “A single burst of radio emission of unknown origin was detected outside our galaxy about six years ago but no one was certain what it was or even if it was real,” he said. “So we have spent the last four years searching for more of these explosive, short-duration radio bursts.”

That original radio flash, known as the ‘Lorimer burst’ after its discoverer, was also found with CSIRO’s Parkes telescope.

“Finding these things requires both a sensitive telescope and spending enough time looking, and that’s what we’ve done with Parkes,” said Dr Johnston.

CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, now under construction in Western Australia, will be running a major survey for transient radio sources like the ones just found with Parkes.

“With the ability to detect these very fast sources we are opening up a whole new area of astrophysics,” said Dr Johnston.

Image: CSIRO’s 64-m Parkes radio telescope. Credit: John Sarkissian, CSIRO.

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Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilisation, according to CSIRO research.

In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO2 fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue.

“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently,” Dr Donohue said. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilisation.

This, along with the vast extents of arid landscapes, means Australia featured prominently in our results.”

“While a CO2 effect on foliage response has long been speculated, until now it has been difficult to demonstrate,” according to Dr Donohue.

“Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilisation effect by using mathematical modelling together with satellite data adjusted to take out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.”

The fertilisation effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.

If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves. These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations, according to Dr Donohue.

“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Dr Donohue said.

“Ongoing research is required if we are to fully comprehend the potential extent and severity of such secondary effects.”

This study was published in the US Geophysical Research Letters journal and was funded by CSIRO’s Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia.

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In Saturn’s Rings is a non-profit giant-screen space art film that takes audiences on a journey of the mind, heart and spirit from the big bang to the near future via the Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn.

Composed entirely of still photographs using innovative visual techniques developed by the filmmaker, In Saturn’s Rings stretches the boundaries of the motion picture form. The film will feature powerful music by Ferry Corsten, William Orbit, Samuel Barber and melds non-narrative visual poetry & science documentary into a rich experience for audiences.

In Saturn’s Rings is a film that’s both personal and universal, experimental and sincere, science and spirit , narrative and documentary. The goal is to use large screen imagery, synchronized to powerful but moving music, to create an experience for those who see it, hear it and feel it.

Using hundreds of thousands of still images manipulated to create full motion, using “2.75D” photographic fly-through technology. The film will be presented in beyond Hollywood quality 5.6K resolution on massive screens and concert-level surround systems to audiences in giant screen institutions, IMAX™ theaters, planetariums, museums and select 4k digital cinemas.

“‘In Saturn’s Rings’ is a film that’s both personal and universal, experimental and sincere, science and spirit , non-narrative and documentary. The goal is to use large screen imagery, synchronized to powerful but moving music, to create an experience for those who see it, hear it and feel it.