22 November 2011
SMGS awarded Three ARC Discovery Grants
The Australian Research Council (ARC) has recently awarded Discovery grants to SMGS researchers Dr Stephen Davis, Professor Kathy Horadam, Professor Andrew Eberhard and Associate Professor Colin Arrowsmith.
It is a special highlight as the School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences was successful in receiving three of the nine grants awarded to RMIT University in this round of funding. With close to one million dollars allocated to these research projects, our researchers and their teams will be able to address the National Research Priorities while expanding Australia’s knowledge base and research capabilities.
As chief investigators for the project ‘Novel Dissimilarity Techniques for Characterising Noisy Spatial Networks’, Davis and Horadam will be working on theoretical advances in two important applications. One of these applications is to test critical assumptions about disease spread in wildlife contact networks, and the other is to create biometric authentication systems that will protect a person’s privacy and secure it against identity theft. This three year SMGS project will be widely applicable to networks in many disciplines.
Eberhard’s research project aims to resolve large scale tightly-constrained optimisation problems that are ubiquitous and include water management, traffic flow and imaging at telescopes and hospitals. Successful completion “will shed light on some theoretical issues in infinite dimensional optimization while offering new tools in important applications area’” Eberhard says.
Arrowsmith’s project titled ‘only at the movies : mapping the contemporary Australian cinema market’ is collaboration with Deakin University. This three year project questions the enduring appeal of cinema going and how it is changing. Arrowsmith says that this project “will provide detailed analyses of formal film exhibition and distribution in Australia by combining economic, cultural and geospatial research with industry expertise.”
Head of School, Professor John Hearne congratulated the staff on their ARC Discovery grant funding success and said “these outstanding achievements in a broad range of areas are a true reflection of the research being conducted within the School”.
2 Young Tasmanian devils bred at Devil Ark protected from an infectious cancer, motivated the study of wildlife contact networks and novel measures of dissimilarity. Photo credit of Andrew Gregory, Australian Geographic Society.