Data centric research at the University of Queensland

Abstract

The University of Queensland (UQ) is in the top 100 universities worldwide measured through a number of major rankings. In 2012, the University had more than 46,000 students including 11,000 international students from 134 nations. It has one of Australia’s largest PhD enrolments, with more than 12,600 postgraduate students. The University’s outstanding 200,000-plus alumni include a Nobel laureate, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, an Academy Award winner, and leaders in government, law, science, public service and the arts. UQ hosts a cross-disciplinary group of researchers working on data centric approaches, spanning the engineering, business and science faculties. The group’s strength lies in its diversity and ability to cater for the entire data pipeline. Members of the group have, and continue to contribute to all aspects of data-centric research including data modelling, indexing, querying, cleansing, analyzing, visualizing, as well as use and adoption over a number of application areas. Currently the group has 26 full time staff and over 50 PhD students. The group was awarded the highest ranking under the Australian Research Council (ARC) Excellence of Research in Australia scheme in 2012 (www.arc.gov.au/era/). From 2005-2010, we managed the ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure (eii.edu.au). The aims of EII were to provide focus for research exchange via networking and collaboration and to improve the quality, impact and visibility of Australian ICT research. This was a unique initiative of the ARC, funded by the ARC in conjunction with financial support provided by 21 Australian and international institutions. Over the course of 5 years, and led by Xiaofang Zhou as convenor of the network, EII made a profound impact on the Australian research community, University sector and IT industry in terms of research collaboration, research training (especially through the annual PhD school), and research quality. Over the years, we have also organized, or contributed to the organization of a number of major conferences in Brisbane including VLDB 1990, WWW 1998, WISE 2004, BPM 2007, DASFAA 2009, ACIS 2010 and ICDE 2013. ACM Multimedia will also be hosted by us in 2015. In this article we first present a short chronology outlining the major topics and achievements of the group in the last three decades. We then present details on a selected number of current topics that we would like to share our viewpoint on, in terms of our focus, contributions and way forward.