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Ten Years of SARL: What’s Next?
No full textSARL is a versatile general-purpose agent-oriented programming language designed to offer fundamental abstractions for agent-oriented programming (AOP) while remaining agnostic to specific agent architectures.
Its robust features empower developers to implement a diverse range of agent models and distributed interaction schemes, catering to various domain-specific requirements.
On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, we review the key concepts and features of SARL.
We highlight its flexibility by showcasing significant extensions and practical use cases.
We also explore SARL’s approach to addressing new AOP requirements and discuss the future directions of the language.</p
Data driven high quantum yield halide perovskite phosphors design and fabrication
No full textThe outstanding emission of halide perovskites make them ideal candidates for white emission light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for lighting applications. However, many perovskites contain toxic or scarce elements and have unsatisfactory stability. Here, we report a target-driven approach, based on active learning (AL) techniques, to discover halide perovskites suitable for commercial LED applications. Based on the similarity between halide and oxide perovskites, a model trained on an oxide perovskite dataset plus six AL-selected halide perovskites exhibited excellent performance for photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) predictions of oxide and halide perovskites. The model proposed a strong relationship between ionic radii and PLQY, postulated to be due to the self-trap excitons derived from the Jahn-Teller deformation. A novel halide perovskite phosphor, Cs4Zn(Bi0.85Sb0.15)2Cl12:0.01Mn, was designed and synthesized with the aid of the model. It exhibited an 88 % PLQY and outstanding thermal and luminescent stability. A simple white LED was fabricated from this material, exemplifying its commercial potential. This study demonstrates how machine learning techniques can accelerate discovery of next-generation phosphors for high performance single emitter-based white-light emitting devices.</p
Improving the Early-Career Experiences of Racially Diverse Project Professionals
No full textThis cross-country, cross-sector qualitative study
explored the early-career experiences of racially
diverse project professionals working in two
prominent project management sectors – business
and professional services (e.g. finance, banking,
consultancy) and construction (e.g. built environment,
infrastucture) – in the UK and Australia. Semistructured
interviews were conducted with 40 diverse
early-career project professionals (both women and
men), with 20 participants from each country. Their
responses were thematically analysed. The study
produced evidence-based recommendations on
how project-based organisations can better facilitate
diverse project practitioners’ transition into the project management profession and meet their early-career needs.</p
Scrutinizing Algorithms: Assessing Journalistic Role Performance in Chinese News Media’s Coverage of Artificial Intelligence
No full textCoverage of artificial intelligence and algorithms has been largely examined by scholars studying countries in the Global North that have historically supported conditions for critical journalism and watchdog journalistic role performances. However, it is unclear if the findings from such work would be applicable to authoritarian contexts that do not share those conditions. This study addresses this gap through a textual analysis of 23 journalistic investigations of AI and algorithmic systems published in Chinese news media between 2019 and 2023. We found that Chinese journalists were critical of multiple aspects of algorithmic systems and called for urgent AI governance at the nation-state level. Despite the technical nature of the issue, those journalists overwhelmingly employed traditional reporting techniques to uncover political and economic intersections—namely those resulting from the rise of tech companies and the algorithms they implement. Chinese journalists simultaneously performed the roles of being watchdogs and loyal facilitators by highlighting the risks posed by private platforms and their algorithms while casting the state as a protector and responsible steward of technological development. The study thus highlights the intricate roles necessary to perform critical journalism in authoritarian contexts, and the possibilities that the case of AI permits.</p
Post-cadastral Determinism: Unravelling Urban Cartographies, Valuation, Behaviour and Decision-making in Realtime.
No full textThe contemporary urban landscape delineates a departure from traditional descriptors and historic anchors, propelled by a confluence of pervasive distributed digital systems. The entanglement of the spatial internet, Web3, APIs, digital twins, real-time data, and analogous platform technologies is pivotal, enmeshing, and orchestrating interactions within urban domains. The influence of network technologies ripples across multifaceted dimensions, shaping navigation, mobility, and service provisioning. Recursive feedback mechanisms and algorithms such as ratings, reviews, suggestions, and recommendations collectively catalyse the attention economy and choice architectures through categorising individual preferences. It is an emergent landscape where the technological infrastructures permeate, not just as tools, but as mediums intertwining with the fabric of societal existence, cultural expression, and urban architecture. The ‘Post-Cadastral’ condition establishes and explores a domain of urban and architectural invention – a city’s imminent escape from cadastral space, embracing virtual realms and digital ubiquity. It is concerned with the hyper-reality of virtual space as mooring of invisible cultural, economic, and societal forces. The domain of research operates at limits of material and spatial practice, integrating the physical, the virtual and holographic; and engaging with real-time, urban data analytics, simulation, gamification, techno-cultural discourse and narrative, AI, and generative techniques. The research explores the convergence of augmented urban infrastructures and services, delineating the interwoven threads of value generation (value capture), behavioural shifts, and performance metrics. It unpacks the emergent paradigm where cities, unleashed from historical cartographic constraints, traverse fluid territories shaped by the synergistic forces of digital evaluations and algorithmic orchestration. In this epochal shift, urban spaces transmute into arenas where cadastral limitations yield to an amorphous terrain of digital augmentation and evolving spatial imaginaries. This paper scrutinizes the intricate interplay of web-centric reviews, ratings, comments, and AI-driven algorithms that organise a departure from conventional urban spatiality – a city abstracted by search terms and contained in the comments sections and sorted by popularity. Delving into this labyrinth, it dissects the convergence of diverse valuation systems, nuanced behavioural patterns, and algorithmically mediated decision-making processes, illuminating the evolving dynamics within contemporary urban environments. Through projects, bespoke workflows, and methodologies, its objective resides in rendering discernible precise pathways wherein technological transitions become etched within the urban continuum, consequently integrated within the realms of architectural practice.</p
Speak Up
No full textSpeak Up (2011) is a vinyl banner installation created for the Fort Project at Brisbane Festival. Using simple materials—vinyl banner, quick links, and rope—the work presents direct text that confronts the viewer with questions of expectation and demand. First exhibited as part of the Under the Radar program at Metro Arts, the piece employs the immediacy and visibility of banner signage to create a moment of confrontation and reflection within the festival context.</p
Controversies over contextual changes: an in-depth analysis of Dat Rung Phuong Nam (2023) film adaptation
No full textThe aim of this study is to explore the controversies that emerged from the contextual changes in the film adaptation of Dat Rung Phuong Nam (2023). The study addresses three main research questions. First, it analyses how the film's contextual changes differ from the original novel and how they are received by the viewers and critics. Second, it evaluates the effect of these controversies on the film's box office performance and critical recognition. Third, it reveals the challenges and opportunities that arise from adapting literary works to the screen, based on the case of Dat Rung Phuong Nam. The study uses a combination of textual analysis, audience reception studies, and industry perspectives to enhance the understanding of the complex dynamics involved in adapting literary masterpieces to the cinematic medium. The study also highlights the nuances of audience engagement and the implications for commercial outcomes and critical reception.</p
The Concentric Influences of Sol LeWitt: Core Artists (Part 1): Ten Countries: Melbourne, Australia
No full textResearch Background: The Concentric Influences of Sol LeWitt: Core Artists Exhibitions interrogates how the influence of one of the twentieth century’s most significant artists persists and transforms across global contexts. With support from the LeWitt family and international universities, the project frames curating as research—knowledge generated through staging, design, and activation rather than replication or biography. Lippard (1973/1997) identified conceptual art as privileging idea over material; Areford (2020, 2021) examined LeWitt’s systemic and serial methods and a “plural LeWitt.” This project tests those propositions through curatorial practice. Research Question: How does LeWitt’s influence reconfigure when artists with direct or indirect ties are staged internationally, revealing influence as responsive, generative, and transnational? Research Significance: Global in scope and depth, The Concentric Influences of Sol LeWitt (Part 1: Core Artists; Part 2: Foundations, Pivots and Place) repositions LeWitt’s conceptual legacy within a living, intercultural framework. Through exhibitions, catalogues, and symposia it delivers verifiable institutional outcomes and sustains the rigour of advanced practice-led research. Each iteration functions as both archive and experiment, expanding curating as a mode of critical inquiry and translation. It situates RMIT as an international nexus for conceptual art discourse and affirms curatorial practice as an evolving site of knowledge production. </p
Impact of Green Technological Innovations, ICT, and Renewable Energy on CO2 Emissions in Emerging Economies
No full textTo understand the impact of green technological innovation (GTI) and ICT technologies on carbon emissions (CO2), this study investigates both the direct and moderating impact of GTI, ICT technologies, renewable energy (RNE), gross domestic product (GDP), and structural change on CO2 emissions by employing a balanced panel dataset for selected emerging economies covering 1990–2020. In this study, we used continuously updated fully modified (CUP-FM), continuously updated biased correction (CUP-BC), and panel quantile regression approach to obtain robust model estimations to cross-country dependencies and heterogeneity. The results show that GTI, RNE, and structural change significantly reduce (CO2) emissions in the chosen economies by advancing technological advancement. Technological advancement significantly reduces CO2 emissions in the selected economies by advancing green technologies leading to greater energy efficiency by encouraging carbon-peaking and carbon-neutrality objectives. In contrast, economic growth (GDP) favorably influences CO2 emissions, suggesting that increased economic activity may initially lead to higher emissions but can be mitigated by technological and policy advancements. As a result, better fiscal incentives, advancement in GTI, increased utilization of RNE, and the effective use of ICT technologies can help to reduce CO2 emissions in the selected emerging economies.</p
Exploring the Utility of High Frequency Satellite Information on Wildfire Characterization and Impact Estimation
No full textWildfires are environmental phenomena that contribute to global carbon emissions and can cause abrupt ecological changes in local environments. Within the context of a changing climate, wildfire frequency and impact are projected to worsen. The effective monitoring, characterisation and impact assessment of wildfires can be quite challenging due to their potentially large extent, which can include a variety of land cover types, fuel loads, moisture conditions and topography. Additional challenges arise also from rapid changes in intensity and direction caused by factors such as the wind velocity and humidity. To this end, collecting data that describes the different stages and aspects of wildfires is crucial for understanding and mitigating their effects.Satellite remote sensing systems provide opportunities to monitor wildfires at a variety of spatiotemporal resolutions. Traditionally, Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) satellite sensors have been the main source of wildfire data, from hotspot detections to severity estimations. Due to their orbital limitations, however, LEO sensors have a temporal resolution (typically 12-24 hours) that is not adequate for capturing the rapidly changing course of an active fire. Meanwhile, GEOstationary (GEO) sensors are capable of capturing data multiple times in an hour but have coarser spatial resolution that reduces the ability to detect small and cool actively burning fires. Contemporary GEO sensors, such as the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI), capture full-disk images of the earth every 10-minutes in a range of visible, near-infrared and thermal spectral channels, opening new pathways for high-frequency wildfire monitoring. This dissertation explores the utility of these satellite sensors for wildfire characterisation and investigates opportunities for new ways of fire impact classification, using AHI which unlike ABI has acquisition coverage over Australia. To address this aim, four research questions are posed.The first research question examined the equivalency of Fire Radiative Power (FRP) estimates – expressed in SI units of megawatts (MW) – from LEO and GEO sensors, during the Black Summer Fires in Southeastern Australia (2019-2020). Specifically, the commonly used data products from the MODIS LEO sensor (MOD14/MYD14) and the AHI sensor (BRIGHT/AHI) were compared. The intercomparison was implemented across different geographical areas and scales, including regional segmentations, spatially and temporally continuous wildfire events and individual concurrent hotspots/pixels. Results show a high agreement between the products at the pixel level (r = 0.74), but with BRIGHT/AHI consistently underestimating FRP (by ~15%) due to its lower spatial resolution. However, BRIGHT/AHI’s temporal profile of fire activity was significantly more detailed at a regional level with up to 144 cloud free observation opportunities every 24 hours compared to MODIS, which has four observation opportunities per day. Therefore, the confidence in BRIGHT/AHI’s ability to capture equivalent wildfire detail to MODIS and reveal new insights, for an extreme event such as the Black Summer fires (2019-2020), was established.The second research question progressed the intercomparison of the BRIGHT/AHI FRP estimations to the whole continent of Australia for an entire year, day and night, inclusive of a diverse range of land covers, burning conditions and durations. In addition to MODIS, LEO active fire detections from VIIRS (VNP14IMG) were included to further explore the effect of higher spatial resolution data in the intercomparison. The results suggest that LEO and GEO products captured similar wildfire dynamics, with a high agreement on a pixel level for concurrent detections (r = 0.74-0.77). The FRP estimations from BRIGHT/AHI, MODIS and VIIRS showed similar distributions across different land covers and regions, although with a clear positive bias for higher spatial resolution data upwards of 10 times the BRIGHT/AHI FRP estimations on average. Unsurprisingly, the regional diurnal fire intensity profiles captured by the LEO sensors demonstrated major temporal gaps between acquisitions compared to BRIGHT/AHI, especially around the times of peak and low fire activity. Examining individual localised events revealed that AHI captured a continuous stream of data that closely followed, although underestimated, all the temporal FRP peaks captured by either MODIS or VIIRS, with MODIS missing fire activity on some occasions. These findings indicate the ability of GEO data to capture active fire information accurately over large spatial scales, with an improved temporal detail over the LEO sensors.With the capability of the BRIGHT/AHI product established, the third research question explored the association of this new stream of wildfire activity data to commonly used burn severity metrics. While burn severity has been extensively studied using bi-temporal spectral differencing indices, such as the Differenced Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR), few studies have examined whether active fire observations capture the same aspects of fire activity as dNBR. Here, the BRIGHT/AHI FRP metrics were compared to Sentinel-2 dNBR metrics across Australia. Results reveal that the two groups of metrics were only weakly correlated for high maximum FPR fires (r = 0.33-0.39), while regional, land cover, and duration variations did not have a significant impact on the correlations. Higher correlations were only achieved after introducing different burned area classification thresholds to derive the fire fractional cover, or FFC, (percentage of an AHI pixel classified as burned by Sentinel-2 data) for each category of fire hotspots based on their fire intensity (FRP) and duration.As the spectral differencing (Sentinel-2 dNBR) and FRP (BRIGHT/AHI) metrics capture independent aspects of wildfire activity, the fourth research question explored the combination of the two in a new wildfire impact classification method. Active fire metrics, such as the maximum FRP, the total energy emitted (Fire Radiative Energy – FRE) and the duration of the fire in a specific pixel location, were combined with the dNBR, the FFC and the pre-fire NBR (as a proxy of pre-fire vegetation health) in a dataset. Commonly used and state of the art dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., PCA, t-SNE, UMAP, PaCMAP) were used to transform the dataset into two-dimensional projections that distributed wildfire pixels in terms of linear or non-linear associations across the six wildfire variables (Maximum FRP, FRE, Duration, dNBR, FFC, pre-fire NBR). Then, agglomerative hierarchical clustering was implemented to group the transformed data into clusters that were aggregated using ensemble clustering. The resulting ensemble clusters represented similar fires across a variety of land covers and were attributed different Composite Wildfire Impact (CWI) ratings based on their individual variable medians. The results reveal that expected fire regime patterns are effectively captured on a continental scale and over a variety of biogeographical settings. Furthermore, despite the spatial resolution differences, local burn severity assessments based on dNBR and in-situ data demonstrated a broad agreement with the proposed CWI rating. The proposed data-driven methodology can be adapted and applied to different environments globally, without the need for training data, and assist in the monitoring of fire regime patterns and trends over extensive spatiotemporal scales.This thesis highlights the potential of contemporary geostationary satellite sensors in advancing wildfire monitoring and impact assessment. By providing continuous, high-frequency observations, GEO sensors can complement and, in some regards, surpass traditional LEO sensors in capturing the dynamic nature of wildfires. The combination of GEO fire intensity metrics with established LEO burn severity indices offers a new pathway to understanding and categorising wildfire impacts across landscapes. The methodology developed here enhances our ability to monitor wildfires on a continental scale, while it also provides a scalable and globally applicable framework for future research and operational monitoring. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires, the insights and tools provided here can inform mitigation strategies and improve our resilience to the environmental challenges of the future.</p