Sci+Tech in the City – Scientific AI

Melbourne – 2 May 2019

Co-presented by CSIRO Data61, CSIRO Alumni, Risklab Australia and the Australian Society of Operations Research. Sci+Tech in the City is a series of short talks hosted by CSIRO Data61 in Melbourne, held regularly on Thursday evening from 4:30pm until around 6pm.

In this week’s Sci+Tech in the City we looked in a practical and hype-free way at the application of AI techniques to scientific discovery and the application of science to real-world innovation and problem-solving.

Our speakers were:

• Ryszard Kowalczyk, (Wipro Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Director of Swinburne Key Lab for Intelligent Software Systems)
• Cheng Soon Ong (from Data61’s Machine Learning Research Group and CSIRO’s new AI/ML Future Science Platform)
• Dr Cecile Paris (Chief Scientist for Data61 and Group Leader of Knowledge Discovery and Management, Decision Sciences Research Programme)

Ryszard described AI/ML activity at Swinburne and amongst its collaborators.

Cheng Soon explained that machine learning is often used to analyse large datasets in science and society, but went on to describe a second (often forgotten) view: how can we use a machine learning predictor, that captures the knowledge we have, to decide what, where and when to measure?

Cecile gave a quick overview of what AI means to Data61 and CSIRO, then described the use of machine learning, statistics and language technologies to detect disease outbreaks and extreme events using social media and other real time data.

After the presentation our guests enjoyed networking and further discussion with experts and colleagues from industry, government and the research community.