Richard Sinnott

Abstract—The development of large-scale software systems remains a non-trivial endeavour. This is especially so when the software systems comprise services and resources coming from multiple distributed software groups, and where they are required ...

The $20m Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) began in July 2010. AURIN has been tasked with developing a secure, Web-based virtual environment (e-Infrastructure) offering seamless, secure access to diverse, distributed and extremely heterogeneous data sets from numerous agencies with an extensive portfolio of targeted analytical and visualization tools. This is being provisioned for Australia-wide urban and built environment researchers – itself a highly heterogeneous collection of research communities with diverse demands, through a unified urban research gateway. This paper describes these demands and how the e-Infrastructure and gateway is being designed and implemented to accommodate this diversity of requirements, both from the user/researcher perspective and from the data provider perspective. The scaling of the infrastructure is presented and the way in which it copes with the spectrum of big data challenges (volume, veracity, variability and velocity) and associated big data analytics. The utility of the e-Infrastructure is also demonstrated through a range of scenarios illustrating and reflecting the interdisciplinary urban research now possible.

With the explosion of digital data, the need for advanced visual analytics, including coordinated multiple views (CMV), is rapidly increasing. CMV enable users to discover patterns and examine relationships across multiple visualizations of one or multiple datasets. CMV have been implemented in a web-based environment through the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project. AURIN offers a platform providing seamless and secure access to an extensive range of distributed urban datasets across Australia. Visual exploration of these datasets is essential to support research endeavors. This paper focuses on the challenges in dealing with complexity and multidimensionality of datasets used in CMV. We rely on the concept of multidimensional data cubes as the theoretical framework for coordination across visualizations. Using the concept of data cubes and hierarchical dimensions, we present strategies to automatically build render groups. This provides an implicit coordination based on cube structures and a framework to establish links between a dataset with its aggregates in a one-to-many fashion. The CMV approach is demonstrated using aggregate-level data, which is provided through federated data services. The paper discusses the issues around our CMV implementation and concludes by reflecting on the challenges in supporting spatio-temporal urban data exploration.

The $47m Australian National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR - www.nectar.org.au) project has recently funded an initiative to establish an Australia-wide endocrine genomics virtual laboratory (endoVL – www.endovl.org.au) covering a range of disorders including type-1, type-2 diabetes, rare diabetes-related disorders, obesity/thyroid disorders, neuroendocrine/adrenal tumours, bone disorders and disorders of sex development. This virtual laboratory will establish a range of targeted databases, clinical registries and support a range of genetically targeted clinical trials leveraging a body of international projects and experiences garnered over many years through a range of EU and MRC funded initiatives. This paper focuses on the plans for endoVL and especially, the systems it leverages in supporting large-scale clinical, collaborative environments.

It is unclear whether the proportion of infants with a disorder of sex development who are raised as male or female has changed over time. The temporal trends in sex assignment of affected cases entered in the International Disorder of Sex Development (I-DSD) Registry were studied. Cases of disorders of sex development reported as partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS; n = 118), disorder of gonadal development (DGD; n = 232), and disorder of androgen synthesis (DAS; n = 104) were divided into those who were born before 1990, 1990-1999, and after 1999. External appearance of the genitalia was described by the external masculinization score. The median (5th-95th percentile) external masculinization scores of those infants with PAIS, DGD, and DAS who were raised as boys were 6 (2-9), 6 (3-9), and 6 (1-12), respectively, and were significantly higher than in those raised as girls (2 [0-6], 2 [0-7], and 0 [0-5], respectively); this difference was maintained in the 3 temporal birt...

ABSTRACT Good water quality is essential for the health of our aquatic ecosystems. Continuous water quality monitoring is an important tool for catchment management authorities, providing real-time data for environmental protection and tracking pollution sources; however, continuous water quality monitoring at high temporal and spatial resolution remains prohibitively expensive. An affordable wireless aquatic monitoring system will enable cost-effective water quality data collection, assisting catchment managers to maintain the health of aquatic ecosystems. In this paper, a low-cost wireless water physiochemistry sensing system is presented. The results indicate that with appropriate calibration, a reliable monitoring system can be established. This will allow catchment managers to continuously monitoring the quality of the water at higher spatial resolution than has previously been feasible, and to maintain this surveillance over an extended period of time. In addition, it helps to understand the behavior of aquatic animals relative to water pollution using data analysis.

Abstract—The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www. aurin. org. au) is tasked with developing an e-Infrastructure to support urban and built environment research across Australia. As identified in [1], this e-Infrastructure must ...

Studies have rarely explored suicides completed following discharge from both general and psychiatric hospital settings. Such research might identify additional opportunities for intervention. To identify and summarise Scottish psychiatric and general hospital records for individuals who have died by suicide. A linked data study of deaths by suicide, aged ≥15 years from 1981 to 2010. This study reports on a UK data-set of individuals who died by suicide (n = 16 411), of whom 66% (n = 10 907) had linkable previous hospital records. Those who died by suicide were 3.1 times more frequently last discharged from general than from psychiatric hospitals; 24% of deaths occurred within 3 months of hospital discharge (58% of these from a general hospital). Only 14% of those discharged from a general hospital had a recorded psychiatric diagnosis at last visit; an additional 19% were found to have a previous lifetime psychiatric diagnosis. Median time between last discharge and death was fourfold greater in those without a psychiatric history. Diagnoses also revealed that less than half of those last discharged from general hospital had had a main diagnosis of 'injury or poisoning'. Suicide prevention activity, including a better psychiatric evaluation of patients within general hospital settings deserves more attention. Improved information flow between secondary and primary care could be facilitated by exploiting electronic records of previous psychiatric diagnoses.

ABSTRACT The development of drugs is an expensive and time consuming activity. Current drug development programmes can require literally require decades to bring a drug to the market and cost in excess of £1bn. In silico drug discovery and the processes associated with it are thus highly desirable to both speed up the development and reduce the overall cost. One way in which in silico drug discovery is realised is through virtual screening. To be potentially useful as a drug a chemist’s compound must be able to interact with locations identified on the biologists protein implicated in the disease state. Candidate compounds can consist of both potential and known drugs. In this paper we present the Drug Discovery Portal (DDP) which provides such a secure collaborative environment. Key aspects of the portal that we consider are the matchmaking service between chemists and biologists. Given that new drugs or biological targets can have considerable commercial value, as does the software used for matching, we focus in particular upon how secure screening and matchmaking can be achieved without necessarily giving away commercially valuable information.

The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN - www.aurin.org.au) is a $20m SuperScience initiative that seeks to support nationwide research across the urban and built environment. The project began in mid-2010 and is due to run to mid-2015. The urban and built environment community is extremely diverse and covers areas as disparate as population demographics, transport, logistics, housing, health, energy and water consumption, through to the future challenges facing the growth of urban settlements. To tackle the many challenges facing urban researchers, access to a wide array of distributed data sets and analytical and visualization tools is essential. These data sets come from a range of national and State-based agencies such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), from industrial and commercial data providers such as utility companies, from research institutions and the researchers themselves, as well as through social media, e.g. Twitter. The AURIN project has defined and prototyped a common architecture (e-Infrastructure) that is intended to make the access to and use of data resources and tools transparent to the research community. This paper describes the architecture that has been developed, its implementation and the supporting tools used in its development, testing and deployment. It provides an overview of the systems that have been developed thus far to realize the technical architecture and the experiences learnt in delivery of the e-Infrastructure.