A positive outcome for the University of Queensland has already resulted from an Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)-funded machine learning platform project launched this year with RCC’s involvement.
Project lead Monash University has opened its series of machine learning-related workshops with five places at each for UQ researchers.
Gavin Rice, a structural biology PhD student at UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), was one of the lucky UQ candidates chosen for the first workshop on Friday, 19 June—an introduction to deep learning and using related software platform Tensorflow.
"I’ve learned a tonne that will be helpful for my research and for HealthHack. I was even able to show some of the data I want to work with to one of the [workshop] tutors and got a few tips. Overall this has been fantastic," said Gavin.
Gavin is working in UQ’s venoms to drugs lab on biodiscovery of novel therapeutics from venoms and structural characterisation of biological nanomachines.
He will present a deep learning project for hackers to work on at next month’s online HealthHack, a hackathon focused on solving health and medical research problems.
Other Monash workshops that UQ researchers have attended thus far included “Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing”, Friday, 19 June, and “Visualisation and Storytelling”, Tuesday, 23 June.
The selected UQ researchers for the three Monash workshops largely hailed from IMB, with one researcher each from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), School of Civil Engineering, School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, and two researchers from the School of Languages and Cultures. They ranged from PhD students to professors.
The deal goes both ways with five Monash researchers invited to attend UQ’s upcoming Cytoscape workshop on Friday, 10 July, led by RCC staff Dr Nick Hamilton and Oliver Cairncross.
"There is a lot of expertise in machine learning, high-performance computing and data visualisation at both UQ and Monash, and it is great to have this support from ARDC to share training, expertise and experiences between the two universities,” said Nick.
Nick is working on the national machine learning platform project titled “Environments to Accelerate Machine Learning-Based Discovery” and has been tasked with selecting UQ candidates for Monash’s workshops.
The machine learning platform will support core related tools for preprocessing, annotating, training and validation, and will integrate with software development environments to provide a consolidated platform for machine learning-based research.
