Current and former SSN grants and projects

Young people are increasingly spending more time on social media platforms and this pattern has transformed social relationships including how young people interact in offline spaces. Prior criminological research noted that young people in youth gangs had a presence on earlier social networking sites including Myspace, Facebook and Twitter (now X). More recently, young people who engage in high harm or peer affiliated offending have taken to newer short-form social media platforms such as Tiktok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Despite these shifts, relatively little attention has been paid to examining the nature of high-harm and peer affiliated content on these newer social media platforms particularly in the Australian context. This project fills this gap by identify the nature of high-harm and peer affiliated content on Tiktok and how that content is engaged with by users on the platform.

The team 

This project is led by Dr Mohammed Ali of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. Dr. Ali has expertise in policing, youth offending, and crime prevention and intervention programming for CALD communities. In addition to his academic role, Dr. Ali regularly provides mentoring to young CALD people in custody. Also at Deakin University, Professor Mohamed Abdelrazek who is a Professor of Software Engineering at the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A2I2). Professor Abdelrazek has expertise in engineering robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems that include GenAI and RL approaches. Professor Abdelrazek is an active researcher in automated software engineering, cloud computing security, formal methods, high-performance computing, IoT, and data science.

The rapid integration of generative AI into the workplace has altered workflows and employee interactions, leading to unprecedented productivity enhancements. However, alongside these benefits, there are emerging concerns about the potential mental health impacts that generative AI may have on workers’ psychological and cognitive well-being. Increased surveillance, performance pressure, and isolation may lead to chronic stress, anxiety, and deterioration in employees’ mental health, along with cognitive overload and diminished decision-making autonomy. This project aims to develop an evidence-based framework to protect employee mental well-being from the adverse effects of generative AI. Moving beyond productivity-focused studies, the project explores the deeper, harmful consequences of generative AI, setting a precedent for policies that safeguard workers and promote more sustainable work environments.

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Davoud Mougouei of the School of IT, Deakin University, an expert in human-centered computing with entrepreneurial experience and interdisciplinary research across computing, social sciences, and psychology. Supporting this effort, Prof. Anthony D. LaMontagne from the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin brings internationally recognized expertise in workplace mental health, occupational health & safety, and research on work as a social determinant of health. Adding a legal perspective, Dr. Niamh Kinchin of Faculty of Business and Law, UoW, specializes in administrative and constitutional Law, focusing her research on AI regulation, high-risk AI, and algorithmic justice. Dr. Hourieh Khalajzadeh further enriches the team with her work on human-centric design. Prof. Roopak Sinha strengthens the team with his expertise in industry standards and safety in computing. Dr. Zitong Sheng from Deakin Business School deepens the understanding of workplace dynamics, researching micro-organizational phenomena such as workplace incivility and safety. Dr. Melissa Parris, also at Deakin Business School, investigates organizational behavior, focusing on workplace experiences and career aspirations. Dr. Sherrica Senewiratne, an organizational psychologist, applies evidence-based practices to address workplace challenges and brings industry experience to strengthen the ability to develop effective interventions suitable to a range of industries. Prof. Munindar P. Singh from NCSU provides expertise in human aspects of AI and social computing. Finally, Dr. Simon Evans from University of Surrey, is an expert in human cognition and behavior.

Truth, authenticity and record mediation offer foundational arguments for historians. These factors now need to be defined for others, such as Artificial Intelligence model developers using historical data as the basis of their public models.
This project aims to outline the ethics of developing Artificial Intelligence personas as representations of real historical people.
This project, named as History, Archives and Ethics (HAE), will take an interdisciplinary approach to the creation of AI models for educational and research purposes. HAE brings together data, communication, philosophy, history, and artificial intelligence experts, alongside archivists and librarians in collaboration to create a trial Artificial Intelligence model using personal historical data. The interdisciplinary approach helps researchers to understand the requirements of other experts to create models, ethically use data, how to best share information with a public audience.

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Deborah Lee-Talbot of the Centre for Contemporary Histories. She is a historian known for her work on gender, archives, libraries, and Australian-Pacific histories. Bringing expertise in matters of ethics and the humanities are Associate Professor Patrick Stokes and Bart Ziino. A/Prof Stokes is a philosopher whose research draws on both the analytic and continental traditions and explores issues of personal identity, the philosophy of death and dying, narrative selfhood, and moral psychology. As one of Australia’s leading scholars of Australians and the First World War, Dr Ziino has extensive publications on commemoration and memorialisation, grief and mourning, war and gender, archives and war, and the emotional experience of enduring the First World War. The data and communication team will assist with industry trends and connections, model creation and creating the AI prompts and programming. This teams consists of; Dr Wei Luo served as the inaugural director for Deakin’s Bachelor of Artificial Intelligence course, the first undergraduate AI programme in Australia, and focuses on reliable machine learning; A/Prof Guangyan Huang is an independent leading researcher with a fast-increasing international reputation in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing and Data Mining; Professor Richard Dazeley is a founding and internationally leading researcher in Multiobjective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) and its application to the Human-alignment problem, where he leads multiple international projects and collaborates with researchers from leading research institutes in the USA/Canada, Europe, South East Asia and South America and A/Prof Toija Cinque, who has expertise in examining media developments related to digitisation, datafication, and platformisation, focusing on the socio-technical and environmental implications of data-driven and algorithmically steered infrastructures and interfaces. The Information Services component of this project will provide insight into researcher trends, and legal requirements. Kristen Thorton is a Curator and Librarian with Deakin’s Special Collections and focuses on how AI can influence user requests and functioning as the custodian of a public collection. Overseeing the Deakin’s archive collections and providing content for the AI trial in this project is Antony Catrice, who has been overseeing Deakin’s tens of thousands of archives for over 25 years. Brad Adams is a Scholarly Services Librarian who assists and teaches people to find relevant, authoritative information.

In the twenty-first century, security experts have become increasingly concerned about climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ to global insecurity. Wars in Sudan, Chad, Syria, and Yemen have all been attributed in part to climate change. Yet there remains considerable debate about the exact relationships between climate, conflict, and migration.

Drawing on the stories of people who sought asylum in Australia and combining them with a new mapping technology, this project will develop new knowledge about how climate change generates insecurity. We will analyse the lived experiences of asylum seekers to Australia from Sudan, Chad, Syria, and Yemen, and embed these stories into an interactive, spatial-temporal map of weather patterns, conflict trends, and asylum flows to Australia. In doing so, we will create new understanding about the relationships between climate change, conflict, and migration, and discover how climate change has shaped the multicultural fabric of Australia.

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Mia Martin Hobbs, in collaboration with Dr Christie Lam and Dr Emily Fitzgerald. Dr Martin Hobbs is in the Centre of Contemporary Histories within the Alfred Deakin Institute. She is an oral historian of warfare with expertise in memories of violent conflict. With Dr Fitzgerald (Melbourne Data Analytics Platform), she developed a new mapping technology for visualizing the journeys of survivors of conflict. Dr Christie Lam, based in the School of Life Sciences, is a leading researcher on the risks of climate change to food insecurity and land access. Dr Martin Hobbs will lead the qualitative work, analysing asylum applications to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal from Sudan, Chad, Syria, and Yemen, looking for indicators of environmental stress (e.g. memories of heat, water scarcity, livestock illness, crop failures, rising food prices, unemployment, urbanization) and links between climate, conflict, and asylum migration. Dr Lam will advise on the analysis of climate stress in the AAT cases and Dr Fitzgerald will advise on preparing the data from the AAT cases for digital mapping. An RA will collect and organise data on climate, conflict, and migration, which will be mapped against the AAT data to contextualise findings.

In this project, an Electric Vehicle (EV) charging optimisation trial will be undertaken with EV users across Victoria. The project aims to develop an enhanced understanding of the EV users’ priorities and preferences towards charging their vehicles in terms of economic, environmental and sustainability goals. Based on the user demand patterns, electricity tariff structures and renewable energy generation forecasts, an optimum schedule to charge the EV will be generated and communicated through text messages to the end users. The trial will continue for a 3-month period over which half of the users will receive text messages on EV charging optimisation, while the control group does not receive any. Finally, a critical evaluation will be performed on the shifts in EV charging patterns along with end user awareness and associated reduction in carbon emissions.

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Shama Naz Islam, senior lecturer in Electrical Engineering from School of Engineering. Her expertise in energy management and energy use optimisation will be useful to develop the EV charging optimisation strategies in this project. A/Prof. Andrea La Nauze is an environmental and behavioural economist specialising in electric vehicles and rooftop solar at Deakin Business School. Her expertise will help the team evaluate the user behaviour patterns in terms of using EVs.

Many GenAI technologies such as Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT siphon up millions of terabytes of data from the Internet without permission from website owners or content creators. This raises important concerns about data protection, consent and the fair use of website data for training large language models (LLMs). More recently, many websites have tried to block GenAI crawlers and other automated agents by using traditional web protocols, in particular the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). The Australian government is currently proposing tranches of new legislation dealing with AI, privacy and data protection. The aim of this project is to empirically evaluate the use of these REPs in an Australian context. From this we will discuss whether alternative technical or legal measures should be implemented to address concerns of both content creators as well as content-hungry AI developers.

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Bingqing Xiong of the Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics in the Business School. She is an expert in in technical solutions for digital platforms, data mining, and data analysis. Her skills include creating advanced algorithms for data mining and predictive modeling to understand patterns in large datasets. Dr Wilson Li brings extensive expertise in cybersecurity, demonstrated by significant publications in top-tier journals such as MIS Quarterly and Decision Support Systems. His strong proficiency in empirical methodologies, coupled with experience in analysing large-scale datasets, will ensure rigorous and reliable data analysis for evaluating GenAI Bot Blocking technologies across diverse industrial environments. Based in Law school, Associate Professor Vicki Huang is a leading expert in empirical legal studies (ELS) and has conducted numerous ELS projects over the last ten years. This includes analysing data and statistics and translating these for a wider audience. Relevant to this project, in 2018 Dr Huang created and taught the unit “Special Topics in Cyber Law” and is currently creating the unit “AI and the Law” for a future trimester.

“Generative AI for Tailored Home Exercise Prescription (GATE)” is a cutting-edge research project addressing challenges in healthcare accessibility and patient adherence by supporting healthcare providers to create personalised home exercise routines. GATE leverages generative AI and motion synthesis technologies to revolutionise exercise prescription for chronic conditions management.
The research focuses on developing an AI-driven tool capable of generating personalised exercise programs, real-time coaching, and adaptive feedback. Employing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework aligns AI-generated content with current evidence and best practice to ensure it is clinically safe, effective, and guideline-compliant. This interdisciplinary project integrates expertise in AI, healthcare, exercise science, and human-computer interaction to advance the frontier of personalised care.
GATE will aspire to deliver scalable, cost-effective solutions that bridge gaps in healthcare delivery.

The team:

This project is led by Dr. Yuxin Zhang from the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN) in the School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences. A digital health expert with a background in computer science and information technology, Dr. Zhang specialises in integrating innovative technologies into healthcare solutions. Also at IPAN, Dr. Jonathan Rawstorn, an exercise scientist and lifestyle researcher with extensive experience in secondary prevention of chronic diseases, will guide the exercise science components of the project. Associate Professor Natalie Lander, an expert in evidence-based teacher education interventions, will contribute to evaluating AI-generated content designed to enhance wellbeing outcomes. Professor Ralph Maddison, a behavioural scientist with expertise in co-designing and evaluating digital interventions for chronic disease management and prevention, will oversee the behavioural science and co-design elements to ensure user-centric solutions. Based in the Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation (IISRI), Dr. Tao Zhou, an AI scientist specialising in computer vision algorithms and human motion analysis, will lead the development of the AI-driven motion synthesis technology.

This project investigates the effectiveness of judge-only trials versus jury trials for criminal cases in multiple jurisdictions in Australia. It exploits a natural experiment setup to decipher the causal channel after assembling a unique set of trials data from 2016 to 2023. Quantitative data from seven jurisdictions, all six states (NSW, Qld, SA, WA, Vic and Tas) and one territory (ACT) will be employed and investigated to examine whether judge-only or jury trials lead to favourable outcomes for the defendant in criminal cases in Australia. Judge-only trials generally require the defendant (after consulting their lawyer) or the prosecution to lodge an application, and the other party must consent. The findings of this study will assist in providing evidence-based results, developing clearer guidelines for practitioners and initiating discussion with relevant stakeholders.

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Antje Kreutzmann-Gallasch. Antje is a lecturer in the Law School. Antje has been teaching Criminal law and Criminal procedure in Victoria for 7 years, which gives her extensive insight into legal and social-cultural issues. Antje has a passion for comparative and interdisciplinary research. She is a member of Deakin’s Centre for Law of Protection and affiliated with the Deakin Network Against Gendered Violence (DNAGV). Dr Prasad Bhattacharya is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics in Deakin Business School. Prasad is an empirical macroeconomist working in the area of economic development and time series analysis and forecasting.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a blood-borne virus that, if untreated, can lead to liver cancer and death. People with serious mental illness (SMI) are at greatly increased risk of contracting HCV. Reasons for this are unclear, but a lack of HCV knowledge, or a lack of appropriate HCV testing and treatment services are potential contributors. There are no HCV testing and treatment programs in Australia designed specifically for people with SMI. Our aim is to inform the development and implementation of appropriately tailored HCV health promotion efforts, and HCV testing and treatment guidelines for Australians with SMI. Using the novel “public health humanities” methodological approach, we will conduct a systematic historical analysis of HCV health promotion campaigns in Australia to date. This will set the groundwork for future research and eventual implementation of targeted health promotion efforts aimed at improving rates of HCV testing and treatment uptake among Australians with SMI.

The team: 

This project is led by chief investigator Dr Carl Moller, postdoctoral research fellow with the Psychosis Research Group at The Institute for Mental and Physical Health and Clinical Translation (IMPACT), Deakin University. Dr Moller is a registered psychologist with a background in both serious mental illness and public health, with a focus on infectious diseases and harm reduction in the context of injecting drug use.

This project is supported by investigator Professor Alison Yung, Professor of Psychiatry and head of the Psychosis Research Group at IMPACT. Professor Yung brings 30+ years of clinical and research expertise in serious mental illness, with a focus on psychotic disorders.

Also supporting this project is investigator Associate Professor Carolyn Holbrook from Deakin University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. A/Prof Holbrook will contribute expertise in the “public health humanities” methodological framework and more broadly in historical studies, public health, public policy, and Australian history.

Collaborating on this project is Dr Bradley Underhill from Deakin University’s Office of the Executive Dean, Arts and Education. Dr Underhill will contribute expertise in modern history, the public uses of history, and expertise in the “public health humanities” methodological framework.

More than half of Australians with clinically relevant symptoms of anxiety or depression do not access a health care consultation for their mental health concerns. Reasons for this treatment gap are complex but may be impacted by gender. The aim of this project is to generate evidence for the field’s first psychological framework to guide a gender-informed approach to reducing the mental health treatment gap. To achieve this, we bring together an interdisciplinary team from psychology, epidemiology, and biostatistics. We will conduct two studies that will be foundational in development of the framework. The first will be an analysis of data from The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health (Ten to Men) and the second will be from a large international sample recruited online. In these studies, we investigate key aspects of the treatment gap including self-assessment gaps (i.e., misalignment between subjective mental health and symptomatology) and diagnosis gaps (i.e., evidence of symptomatology without diagnosis).

The team: 

This project is led by Dr Lauren Francis of the School of Psychology in the Faculty of Health. She is an emerging expert on psychological health and wellbeing in men and analysis of longitudinal data. Also in the School of Psychology, Associate Professor Jacqui Macdonald is a national leader in men’s mental health and healthcare access, and lifecourse longitudinal studies of men and women. A/Prof Macdonald will serve as a mentor on this project. Dr Francis and A/Prof Macdonald have previously published with data from The Australian longitudinal Study on Male Health (Ten to Men) and are experienced in the recruitment of large samples recruited online. Stephanie Aarsman is a Biostatistician with the SEED Lifespan Strategic Research Centre, Deakin University. She has extensive experience with biostatistical analysis of national longitudinal datasets. Dr Sifan Cao is a Research Fellow with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Monash University where she is an emerging expert in women’s health research. She has extensive experience in epidemiological analysis of national longitudinal datasets.

Food packages are not currently designed in ways that make it easy for consumers to identify and select healthier foods. To promote healthier packaged food choices, it is important to consider the design of food packages as a whole, including all the marketing and nutrition elements (images, logos and text), and how these elements are arranged (the design hierarchy).  Through the application of artificial intelligence, combined with insights from nutrition science, visual communication design, marketing and food policy, this project aims to develop an urgently needed, rigorous, low resource tool for identifying how food healthy and unhealthy packages are designed, in real-world retail environments.

The team: Dr Georgie Russell (School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition) leads this team. Georgie has expertise in behavioural nutrition including understanding how and why individuals select and consume foods. Associate Professor Meghan Kelly (School of Communication and Creative Arts)  has expertise in visual communication design and participatory design practices in both commercial and academic settings. Dr Paul Harrison (Deakin Business School, Department of Marketing) has expertise in examining the effect of marketing and advertising on consumer behaviour and implications for consumers, policy and business.

Associate Professor Abbas Khosravi (Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation) has expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning and their application for healthcare. Dr Priscila Machado (School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition) is a public health nutrition scientist with expertise in nutrition policy, ultra-processed foods and assessing and monitoring food consumption patterns.

The development of skills in childhood for managing risky situations and avoiding injuries is poorly understood. Understanding how children assess and handle risks can inform active transport guidance, injury prevention interventions, and schools regarding the provision of equipment/policies around play. There are ethical challenges with research that puts children in real-life situations that could result in injury. The Norwegian collaborators on this project developed a Virtual Risk Management (VRM) system to overcome this challenge using virtual reality. This study aims to develop a collaboration between Faculties to pilot test the VRM system in 30-40 Australian children aged 10-12 years.

The team:  This project is led by Dr Emiliano Mazzoli of the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN) in the School of Health and Social Development.  He is an expert in children’s physical activity and executive functioning (relevant to decision making) and has expertise in motor competence assessment. Also at IPAN, Professor Lisa Barnett is the leading researcher in the world in motor skills and Associate Professor Jenny Veitch is an expert in children’s physical activity relevant to parks and recreation. Alethea Jerebine is in the final stages of her PhD (supervised by Professor Barnett) and has produced the first international policy analysis on risk and play in schools and the first Australian data on parental attitudes to risky active play.

Based in the School of Information Technology, Associate Professor Thuong Hoang works on interaction techniques and devices, human factors, and educational technologies, and Dr Deepti Aggarwal has expertise in technologies like virtual reality (VR) and wearables to tackle real-world issues. They will lead the analysis of the VR and eye tracking data along with Professor Stefan Greuter, Director of Deakin’s Motion Lab, who has experience in designing VR experiences and natural user interactions within virtual worlds. Theresa Heering, based in the School of Health and Social Development, is in the final stages of her dual PhD and will lead sensor data processing using MATLAB.

The Australian housing market has been a topic of extensive discussion and concern for decades. The market has witnessed soaring property and rental prices in major cities, making housing affordability a critical issue for many Australians. To reflect both social and physical/environmental challenges the Australian housing market faces, our project aims to construct Housing Sustainability Indices (HSI) for Australian major cities; and provide affordability, environmental considerations, and regulatory measures.  Our project focuses on providing a holistic measure of housing affordability, and we will harness Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly the Neural Dynamical Model, as the cutting-edge technique to build a robust, spatially granular, and dynamic housing affordability index.

The team: Dr Ruipeng Liu of the Department of Finance at Deakin’s Business School leads this project. His research focuses on financial market modelling, risk measurements and management, and volatility forecasting. He works on asset pricing, financial market anomalies, and behavioural aspects of finance and climate finance. He applies tools from stochastic physics such as multifractal processes, to study stylized facts of financial markets such as volatility clustering and long memory.

Dr. Wei Luo (School of Information Technology)’s research focuses on improving the reliability of machine learning models to benefit the broader community. He aims to create machine learning models faithful to the application domain and robust in the prediction and thus tackles the research challenges in model uncertainty and generalisation via geometric and topological methods, particularly through the lens of dynamical systems.

Associate Prof. Qiang Li  works in the Department of Finance, Deakin Business School. His research focuses on real estate finance and economics, urban economics, and urban policy and planning. His current research interests include ethnic diversity and urban housing markets, the economics of skyscrapers, immigration and housing markets, and housing cycles. He applies economic analysis to both theoretical and practical issues in the housing market and in cities.

The aims of the project are to examine the prevalence of Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS), Burnout (BO) and Compassion Satisfaction (CS) in Australian teachers, and to explore work and individual related factors that may increase vulnerability or protect teachers from the impact of secondary exposure to trauma. A sample of at least 500 currently registered and practicing teachers across Australia via professional associations, social media (paid and unpaid advertising) and snowballing. The study design will involve mixed methods, including a cross sectional correlational online survey and 20 to 30 exploratory interviews drawn from volunteers from the survey group.

The team: This project was initially led by Dr Rebecca Diehm,  who has moved on from Deakin, and passed the CI reigns to Dr John Molineux. She remains on the team as an external member based at Barwon Health. Dr John Molineux has 30 years of experience as a human resource manager, and as an academic for the last 13 years engaging in teaching, supervision of PhD and DBA students, and is currently the Director of the Master of Human Resource Management Course

Dr Rebecca Diehm has over 14 years of experience working as a Clinical Psychologist (AHPRA, MAPS), and is a Board Approved Psychology Supervisor. She has over 12 years of experience working as an academic, establishing collaborations dealing with trauma, and the impact of secondary exposure to trauma.

Dr Ben Arnold is a Research Fellow in the Educator Health and Wellbeing team at Deakin University. Ben’s research focuses on conceptualising, operationalising, and measuring educator health, safety and wellbeing for research and policy purposes.

Dr Georgiana Cameron has had over 15 years experience working as an educational and developmental psychologist and supervisor within schools, universities and community services. She is particularly interested in supporting and studying teacher wellbeing.

In response to the critical challenges faced by Victoria’s mental health system, this research employs a systems-based approach to co-design mental health solutions using both qualitative and quantitative system dynamics methodologies. A collaborative research initiative between Deakin University, Barwon Health and the SAX Institute, the project aims to develop a system dynamics model of care transitions within Barwon Health’s Swanston Centre Acute mental health unit. This model will be used to test the efficacy of intervention scenarios and will be used as a proof-of-concept for future grant applications. This integrative approach is innovative in the Australian public health and mental health contexts, aiming to bridge stakeholder insights with data-driven analysis the research aims to develop comprehensive solutions for improved mental health outcomes in the Barwon-Southwest Region.

The team: This team is led by Dr Tari Forrester-Bowling (pictured above with her assistance dog Peanut), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Development and GLOBE (Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition). It has five further Deakin CIs and three external members at the Sax Institute. At Deakin, Dr Ha Le is a Health Economist, and Senior Research fellow, specialising in Health Economics based in the school of Health and Social Development.

Dr James McClure is a Research Fellow specialising in Stakeholder support at CHIME (Change to Improve Mental Health Translational Research Partnership) at the Institute for Health Transformation (IHT). Senior Lecturer in Social Work (School of Health), Dr James Lukas is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work. Alfred Deakin Professor Anne Peeters is the Director of the IHT.

Stephanie Bennetts is a Research Assistant and PhD Candidate at CHIME, and Andrew Brown is a Research Fellow in the GLOBE, also in the School of Health and Social Development. The team will be working Dr Danielle Currie, Principal Simulation Modeller at the Sax Institute, as well as Barwon Health.

The Deakin Science and Society congratulates our new grantees. For 2023 six outstanding Interdisciplinary Incubator projects have been funded, as profiled below. Pictured here is the 2023 induction meeting where grantees shared their work with each other, and the SSN convenors.

Our grantees hail from diverse faculties and Institutes across Deakin, including

• The Institute of Frontier Materials (IFM) 
• The Faculty of Health 
• The Faculty of Arts and Education 
• National Indigenous Knowledges Education Research Innovation (NIKERI) Institute
• The Deakin Business School 
• The Faculty of Science, Engineering the Built Environment (SEBE)
• The CADET Virtual Reality lab

And from across Australia (RMIT, UNSW, Bowel Cancer Australia, the IMPACT Institute, Textile Recyclers Australia) and the globe (the UK and Mexico).

Motor competence (MC) is positively associated with higher levels of social and cognitive development, self-perception, physical activity and physical fitness. The childhood years provide a critical window of opportunity to develop MC, as such, it is a priority of national and international Health and Physical Education curriculums. In spite of its importance, low levels of MC in children remains a global health concern. Existing MC assessment is challenging due to time, cost, resources and training needs, resulting in minimal application and limited remediation. A MC assessment using Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) has been developed by HASS scientists Dr Lander and A/Prof Barnett in collaboration with STEM scientists A/Prof Mohamed and Dr Nahavandi. This prototype uses four IMUs with a Windows surface tablet. Motion data is streamed in real time to the tablet highlighting specific areas in need of improvement. The proposed SSN funding will be used to i) refine the prototype for use by teachers, and ii) to test implementation effectiveness of the App when used by teachers in schools.

The Team: Dr Natalie Lander (lead CI, pictured), A/Proff Eduarda Sousa- Sá, A/Prof Lisa Barnett, A/Prof Shady Mohamed, Dr Darius Nahavandi, Dr Steven Lewis, Prof Mike Duncan

This study examines perceptions and representations of older people in rural and regional Australia during COVID-19, which may include instances of ageism, stigma, and stereotype. First, we will analyse how older people are represented in local media outlets during COVID-19. Then, will conduct a pilot survey and interviews with stakeholders in the community (i.e. older people, general public, healthcare professionals, journalists) to examine the impact the representations of older people in the media are having on the policies (e.g. selective lockdowns) and professional practices (e.g. healthcare and journalism) that support and/or influence health and wellbeing. The Team: Dr Cynthia Forlini (lead CI, pictured), Dr Christopher Mayes, A/Prof Kristy Hess, Dr Lisa Mitchell, Ms Courtney Hempton, Prof Alison Hutchison

Although pivotal to maternal and foetal health, the placenta is still not well understood, constraining scientific research on critical conditions like preeclampsia and foetal growth restriction. This is due in part to a lack of appropriate research models: animal placentas are inaccurate mimics, and human placenta donated from births and terminations has a limited research life. However, new biotechnologies are changing this. Emerging in recent years, placental organoids and placenta-on-chip models allow for placental cells to be cultured and grown indefinitely, or “immortalised”. This project explores new placental technologies from a feminist perspective, considering crucial questions of consent, ownership, commodification and antenatal care that emerge as these technologies reshape placenta research practices.

The Team: Dr Jaya Keaney (lead CI, pictured), Dr Jacqueline Dalzeill, Dr Marnie Winter, A/Prof Neera Bhatia, A/Prof Dominique Martin

In a ‘COVID normal’ future, with viral threats potentially loose in the environment, engineers could develop wearable garments to allow individuals to detect significantly high temperatures in others, and to signal their own temperature. Yet the form of these technologies and the social and ethical implications need to be considered in order to ensure that potential defences do not unreasonably undermine individual rights and the defence of the potentially vulnerable in society. The development of such technologies requires an interdisciplinary approach to ensure design and potential implementation is informed by practicalities of the technology and user interaction, in addition to social and ethical considerations.

The Team: Dr Negin Amini (lead CI, pictured), Dr Monique Mann, Ms Courtney Hempton, Dr Tanya King, Prof Jennifer Loy

This project explores digital health technologies to better understand their role and contributions to public health and other public goods in the context of COVID-19 in Australia. Effective and efficient contact tracing systems are required as we enter into a new “COVID normal”. Yet, there are a range of open empirical questions regarding efficacy of contact tracing applications, and their contribution to public health in this large-scale social experiment. There is an even bigger question about whether we really need an app for that and if an app for that is the right solution to the problems posed by COVID-19.

The Team: Dr Monique Mann (lead CI, pictured), Dr Luke Heemsbergen, Professor Catherine Bennett, Associate Professor Paul Cooper, Associate Professor Martin Hensher

Medicare is one of the pillars of Australian civic society—it is emblematic of the Australian tradition of state intervention to promote the health and well-being of its citizens. The future viability of the public health system is among the most pressing problems facing our nation. We are familiar with concerns about the ageing population, and the increased pressure on under- resourced public hospitals. Recently, we have heard much about the rising cost and unsustainability of a private health care system that is subsidised by the state to the tune of $6 billion annually, yet continues to be abandoned at an alarming rate by unsatisfied customers. This project aims to provide insights into future directions for Australian public health policy by enhancing understanding of links between service access and efficacy and the status of Medicare as a cultural entity. It will: 1) use surveys to examine the impact of attitudes to Medicare on healthcare setting behaviour, 2) study the economic arguments underpinning the role of Medicare in Australia, 3) examine the policy history of health funding, 4) conduct a cultural history of Medicare, 5) study representations and perceptions of Medicare as a brand, and 6) study health policy reportage in Australian media from 1980 to present.

The Team: Dr Carolyn Holbrook (lead CI, pictured), Prof David Lowe, Prof Catherine Bennett, Dr Paul Crosland, Prof Matthew Ricketson, Dr Richie Barker

A collaboration between School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Health and Social Development, and the School of Communication and Creative Arts

For the past two decades, successive Australian governments have sought to increase the participation of women in STEM-related fields. One reason for this is the advancement of social equality; another reason is the popular theory that STEM-based- innovation is and will be a primary driver of future economic growth. Rigorous intellectual property law (particularly patent law), supports this strategy by facilitating the commercialisation of innovative ideas. A patent provides the inventor(s) with an opportunity to monetise their work, and (in exchange) the technology disclosed can be used by the public to further scientific progress. One measure of female participation in STEM, is participation as an inventor in the patents system. There is some evidence that Australian patent applications with female inventors have increased over the last 30 years. However, while applications have increased, it is unclear whether women are as successful as men in having their patent application proceed to grant. This project seeks to discover whether women receive less favourable outcomes than men when applying for an Australian patent. It aims to attach a probable gender (female, male or unclear) to Australian patent applications filed between 2000 and 2014. This project will examine whether gender is related to a range of outcomes including rates of rejection, claim revision, citation rates and field of technology.

The Team: Dr Vicki Huang (lead CI, pictured), Dr Sue Finch

A collaboration between Business & Law and Statistics

Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a common neurodevelopmental condition thought to affect around 1% of children worldwide, and persisting into adulthood in many cases. As a tic disorder, TS is characterized by multiple motor and one or more vocal tics at some time during the illness, the waxing and waning of tics over a period of more than 1 year, and onset before the age of 18 years. Tics are extremely diverse, ranging from simple motor and vocal tics (e.g. blinking, sniffing) to complex movements and utterances that can appear purposeful. To date most TS research has been patho-physiologically focused on underlying brain mechanisms with little attention directed to the lived experience of patients. This means that treatment of TS has been largely biologically focused, and the characteristic experiences and mode of selfhood at stake have not yet been addressed. To put it another way, philosophy has not yet been heavily involved, despite burgeoning work in phenomenological psychiatry concerning anomalous self-experience, which has given significant attention to the kinds of experiences of selfhood and other-relations in schizophrenia and depression. We propose to build a team across Deakin and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute to set up an interdisciplinary group to better bridge these fields of TS scholarship and enable the first-personal and third-personal dimensions to mutually enrich one another. In addition, we have a proposal for how to effect this change which we want to pilot, juxtaposing both cognitive neuroscience and qualitative phenomenological interviews.

The Team: A/Prof Tim Silk (Lead CI, pictured), Dr Daniel Corp, Jordan Morrison-Ham; Prof Jack Reynolds, Dr Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt, and A/Prof Daryl Efron

A collaboration between the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, School of Humanities and Social Science, and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Over the past decade, there has been increased interest and attention paid to the long history of Aboriginal peoples’ fire management practices across Australia and how this knowledge may help address biodiversity and fire management challenges. In Victoria, this renewed interest has been paralleled by an increasing level of recognition and partnership between Traditional Owners and state government agencies engaged in land management. Despite enthusiasm surrounding these initiatives, their establishment and expansion is hindered by insufficient scientific evidence surrounding their benefits to Country and community. While evidence on these topics exists for northern Australia, many deem this to be of uncertain relevance – ecologically and socially speaking – to the Victorian and southeast Australian context. Our project will help ameliorate this lack of supporting research, which is necessary for the realisation of Traditional Owners’ fire management aspirations.

The Team: Dr Timothy Neale (lead CI, pictured), Professor Euan Ritchie, Dr Will Smith, and Dr Tim Doherty

A collaboration between the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment, the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning

There is a global trend of police departments using algorithms and software-driven decision- making to target individuals or geographic places for law enforcement efforts. Known as ‘predictive policing’, there have been experiments with this technology in the United States, England, Germany, Switzerland, and China. This research project investigates the impact of software-driven decision-making within Australian policing. It offers an important policy perspective that brings together technical expertise from AI and cybersecurity, with law, criminology, and social scientists in Indigenous and technology studies. Public authorities within Australia are adopting algorithmic support and the field of law enforcement is a high-stakes domain where experimentation with this technology is questionable. It is of pressing importance that software which informs police decision-making is suitably scrutinised and critiqued.

The Team: Dr Diarmaid Harkin (lead CI, pictured), Prof Debi Ashenden, Dr Leonard Hoon, Prof Marilyn McMahon, Dr Thao Phan, Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, Dr Ian Warren, Dr Monique Mann

A collaboration between the Alfred Deakin Institute, the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, School of Business and Law, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Institute for Koori Education, and the Centre for Cyber Security

This research will investigate how smart cities can use crowdsourcing to provision a collective cloud of computational resources. Smart cities require support for high-velocity and real-time services involving sensor data, such as autonomous vehicles, environmental monitoring and connected wearables, needing geographically distributed computing resources that are fault- tolerant, trustworthy and highly available. One approach to enable the above is to crowdsource computing resources by enabling users to share their own computing devices. Our project seeks to explore how smaller scale problems can use the collective computational power at local (city) level, and exploit on-the-fly resource encounters. Specifically, this research will explore: 1) what are the characteristics of problems that can benefit from citizen-powered, on-the- fly, decentralised computing? 2) why users will participate and how can users be incentivised to participate? and 3) how can such incentive schemes be technically implemented?

The Team: Dr Niroshinie Fernando (lead CI, pictured), Prof Send W. Loke, A/Prof Lubna Alam

A collaboration between the School of IT and the Faculty of Business and Law

I have recently joined the Blue Carbon Lab to lead the Coastal Victorian Restoration Program that is restoring degraded saltmarsh wetlands along the Victorian coast. These amazing ecosystems do so much for humans, yet remain severely underappreciated and valued. Keeping them healthy is critical to maintain clean water, sequester carbon, and to support wildlife and fish populations.​ ​Unfortunately, the rate of loss of wetlands (driven mostly by human activities) is estimated to be among the highest of any ecosystem on the planet.​ Harnessed with the scientific knowledge about saltmarsh wetlands and other “Blue Carbon” ecosystems, I wish to explore how to bridge the gap of translating complex scientific information to the general public in a way that evokes interest and emotion. I will host an interdisciplinary 1-day workshop to bring together artists, scientists (STEM and HASS) and educators to discuss and develop ideas for using virtual reality to translate and educate Blue Carbon science concepts to the general public. The aim of this activity is to have an open table discussion about key concepts in Blue Carbon science that can easily be translated into an interactive artistic experience, while still providing an educational message. I will also participate in a 1-week training program in February 2020 to learn basic skills in Virtual Reality production. ​I will learn about the basic VR technologies including headset technology, LiDAR (remote sensing technology), tethered virtual reality, and body tracking.

The Team: Dr Melissa Wartman (lead CI, pictured)

A collaboration between the Centre for Integrated Ecology, Deakin Cadet VR Lab, Deakin Motion Lab, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Streamline Media, VRTOV

This interdisciplinary collaboration aims to explore and develop novel approaches to analyse rich student assessment data in mathematics, to provide crucial evidence for innovations in teaching and learning in schools. It draws on the great potential of the latest technology breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the machine learning approaches suitable for learning analytics, to identify and map student learning in mathematics using a wide range of student assessment data that has not been dealt with extensively in learning analytics, including audio/visual records of student classroom interactions, student artefacts, and other student assessment data types collected regularly by their classroom teachers. Two major activities are proposed: 1) interdisciplinary workshops to exchange ideas and methods in each discipline and to discuss scoping and study designs of potential research projects; and 2) a literature review focusing on learning analytics and assessment data in the context of school mathematics.

The Team: Dr Lihua Xu (lead CI, pictured), Dr Wei Luo, A/Prof Jianxin Li

A collaboration between the School of Education and the School of Information Technology

The use of open data and large-scale data analytics is rare in law and other HASS fields. This is likely due to a lack of awareness of data availability and a lack of skills to explore that data. For example, in relation to the former, there is little awareness amongst (at least) law academics of the Government’s various initiatives to make data open and accessible specifically for academic research. In relation to skills with data, there is a lack of awareness by HASS researchers of the work done by STEM academics; their more advanced use of large data sets and affinity for working in teams. For example, in law, there is a cultural preference for sole-authored works. This grant will be used to run a workshop on Government open data initiaties for academics, followed by a ‘speed-meeting’ session between HASS and STEM researchers. The broad research topic addressed will be: “How can analysis of big data enhance interdisciplinary research?”

The Team: Dr Vicki Huang (lead CI, pictured)

A collaboration between the Faculty of Business and Law, IP Australia, and CSIRO Data 61

How can culture shape the data-driven future of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it impacts on the human world? AI, by definition, can make decisions autonomously from any direct human control. Everyday people can already be affected by AI decisions in areas as varied as education, finance, the law and medicine as well as in digital spaces such as social media and chatbots. Recent scholarship in AI ethics argues that socio-cultural values must be embedded in AI reasoning from the design stage and identifies a need for new methodologies to “elicit the values held by all stakeholders, and make them explicit.” Public consultations, such as those recently conducted by the CSIRO and Standards Australia, seek input from experts, industry, and government bodies but have typically failed to generate high levels of input from the general public. Popular culture, particularly science fiction, offers a largely untapped living archive of information about social attitudes and beliefs about AI. This project aims to explore how that archive might be used to promote value-driven design (VDD) in AI, by piloting a new methodology that incorporates an ethics-in-literature approach to VDD.

The Team: Dr Helen Young (lead CI, pictured), Dr Leonard Hoon, Dr Evie Kendal, Dr Thao Phan, Professor Sean Redmond

A collaboration between the School of Communication and Creative Arts, School of Medicine, Alfred Deakin Institute, and the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute

This interdisciplinary project is about how we can use extended reality technologies to communicate engineering and design heritage in post-industrial cities. We want to basically create a pop up museum experience, because we believe that it’s very important to go closer to the audience, and using technology to create something that is engaging, that’s meaningful. We believe it could bring new audiences to cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, or heritage centres.

If we look at Geelong, which lost of a lot of traditional manufacturing capacities, I think it’s important to bring back this civic pride as well, through communicating those achievements throughout the history, and tell the future generations that what’s now coming to Geelong – all this innovation, design, advanced manufacturing – it’s actually as a result of this tradition for so many decades.

We’re doing interviews with local leaders from education, heritage, government, tourism, and manufacturing. We’re also doing online surveys to talk to the local community. Once we’ve got these results, we will be able to analyse them and prepare participatory procreative workshops with the local communities, in which we will be able to evaluate what’s interesting for them from the interaction perspective and from the perspective of content.

We have involved engineers who are going to develop this. We have designers who will be exploring different ways of 3D interaction within this VR, AR, or mixed reality or extended reality experience, and we have researchers from a heritage perspective as well.

The grant scheme is a great initiative, because we have so many different and great researchers across one university, and this is the way how we can learn about each others’ skills and knowledge without going out of the university. And it’s a great platform as a pilot project that can lead into a bigger project to be competitive on a national or even international level.

The Team: Dr Kaja Antlej (co-investigator, pictured)

A collaboration with Deakin School of Engineering (Faculty of Science and the Built Environment), School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Coventry University and Aarhus University.

It’s an interdisciplinary project where we’ve got historians, fish scientists, curators and Menang Indigenous knowledge holders in Albany, WA.

We are unpacking together this historical fish collection that was caught by Nyungar men in the 1840s and they were preserved and stored in Edinburgh, where they are now in the National Museum of Scotland. With these specimens, manuscript notes and historical sketches of the fish, we tried to understand the Indigenous knowledge that is held within them and also the scientific knowledge that is captured from that time as well.

I think it’s really exciting to have this richness of different ways of exploring one particular historical collection.

One of the major challenges (and opportunities) is to think about how I explain myself beyond my discipline, so communicating in a much more lateral way. It’s been such a great opportunity to meet all these different people and other areas that I wouldn’t normally contact. We actually found we’ve got a lot in common; our interests are very similar though we are in different disciplines. It’s been really, really wonderful and I feel like it’s a very exciting new beginning, this moment in my career, to work in this way. It’s great.

The Team: A/Prof Tiffany Shellam (co-investigator, pictured)

A collaboration with Menang Nyungar Knowledge holders, Deakin School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Western Australian Museum, University of Western Australia, National Museum of Scotland.

Our project is basically looking at musical performances and trying to capture and convey the aliveness and physicalities of it.

We’re using a range of different technologies, including motion capture, heartbeat, heart rate sensor, eye tracking, thermal cameras hopefully. Essentially, we’re trying to get a holistic view of live musical performance through data capture.

We’re trying to get some sort of read on the emotional response of the actual performance. Then, the idea is to create a visualisation that represents the entirety of the performance as far as you can take it… as far as we can take it with the technology we have.

The Australian National Academy of Music was an industry partner that we had on a project we were already working on, so what the SSN scheme has allowed us to do is to formalise the work that we’ve been doing, and of course, a little bit of funding is always fantastic.

The Team: Co-investigators Dr Thuong Hoang, Dr Greg Bowtell and Dr Jordan Vincent (pictured)

A collaboration with Deakin Motion.Lab, School of Communication and Creative Arts (Faculty of Arts and Education), Deakin School of IT (Faculty of Science and the Built Environment) and Australian National Academy of Music

My project is concerned with the use of 3D printing in medical practice, and we’re trying to think about how the decentralised sharing of designs and manufacture will affect clinical care. So what I’ve done is I’ve invited in some really interesting people from literal brain surgeons to medical ethicists. It’s this really interesting mix of ethicists and practitioners to manufacturers, people who make 3D printing systems.

It’s a back casting project which means we start with a specified future and then consider what paths we need to take in terms of policy and technology and social developments to get to that future. This is a methodology that has been used in policy circles for a while, around things like climate change.

There’s all kinds of legal and social issues as well as ethical issues that come up, and so we’re just going to work through those and the project is there to pull these out and then figure out what kind of collaborations we can move on to once those futures are kind of charted.

I actually just get to choose awesome people who are doing amazing work in ways that are disparately amazing, yet they’re connected in some way and I just get to tie them all together, so that’s been so far a lot of fun and I’ll see what comes from it.

The Team: Dr Luke Heemsbergen (Chief Investigator, pictured)

A collaboration with Anatomics (Melbourne), Shapeways (New York) and ARC Training Centre in Additive Biomanufacturing.

The project is about teaching of professionalism and my colleague Evie Kendal and I were very aware that lots of programs teach professionalism at Deakin, but we weren’t aware of any collaboration or discussion between academics with expertise in this area.

At this stage we’ve got participation from quite a few of the schools in the Faculty of Health, so Medicine – my school, Psychology, Nursing, Midwifery and Dietetics. Then as far as disciplines outside of health, we’ve found some key people in Law, IT and Education. What we’ve managed to do is get people who were very generous in giving up their time to come to a workshop, who have real experience and expertise in the area and seem very keen to do some collaboration.

It’s provided the impetus to get the key players in the one room and I now have at least an informal network at Deakin of people who have more experience than I do in teaching professionalism.

The Team: Jane Duffy (co-investigator, pictured)

In partnership with Deakin School of Medicine (Faculty of Health).

We’re a multidisciplinary team: Game design, animation, vision sciences, optometry, and VR technology. Principally, it was the VR and game design coming together with the vision science team, because that technology was really important as a platform in which to do this research and testing towards a treatment for amblyopia. If you’re going to have a VR, you’re going to have things moving, you need animators, so there’ll also be 3D animators eventually. You also need to understand human binocular vision.

Our project is led by Geoff Sampson from the School of Medicine. The whole research team now has a good understanding of what amblyopia is, why it’s got to be treated in certain ways rather than others, and so on. So, it’s a kind of a sharing of knowledge, a sharing of language.

It’s given us insight into how to go about putting a team together, writing an application; what do you then have to do to really get that application absolutely watertight, the language that you use, making sure that it’s really clear and not full of jargon.

The Team: Dr Rose Woodcock (co-investigator, pictured)

A collaboration with Deakin School of Medicine (Faculty of Health) and School of Communication and Creative Arts (Faculty of Arts and Education).