Research Insights Series talk on GenAI by me, paired with a separate talk by Dr. Adele Haythornthwaite.
There has been a very rapid and wide uptake of innovative new Generative AI (GenAI) technologies over the past two years. While it undoubtedly has had many positive impacts for research, there are significant risks and disadvantages in its use. How do researchers engage with this exciting new technology to optimise their work, while recognising and managing risks to ensure its safe use?
This session’s speakers will explore how to achieve a balance between opportunity and risk in using GenAI for research, including examples of innovative research use cases followed by a brief rundown of identifying and managing risks in order to maintain research integrity and data security.
SPEAKERS: Dr Gordon McDonald - Informatics Team Lead, Sydney Informatics Hub. Dr Adele Haythornthwaite - Manager, Research Data Strategy.
2024-02-21 AI in Research
Research portfolio researcher spotlight talk given by Dr. Henry Lydecker and myself.
Discover how AI is transforming our everyday work as researchers, and unlocking new capabilities in areas such as biotechnology, geospatial analysis, medical imagery and microscopy, conservation, and linguistics. We’ll share how the Sydney Informatics Hub is working with researchers across the university to shape the future of scientific discovery and innovation within our own research portfolio.
2024-02-07 Design your AI chatbot
Concept development Worksheets for an interactive unconference session in which educators were prompted to design their own AI chatbot. During the Research education and generative AI session at the 2024 Sydney Education Unconference.
2023_11_30 Gen-AI in Research Masterclass (Youtube)
Presented by Dr. Henry Lydecker and Dr. Gordon McDonald of the Sydney Informatics Hub, on the 30th November 2023, as part of CSIRO's National AI Month.
Everyone is using ChatGPT these days, but how exactly can you get the most out of generative AI tools for your research? In this Sydney Informatics Hub Masterclass we'll show you three killer ways you can take advantage of these new AI magic tricks so you can use them like a research wizard. We'll briefly overview the traps to avoid, and then show you a glimpse of the future where AI does the boring parts of your job for you!
2023_09_26 ChatGPT for Research
Talk at ResBaz Sydney 2023.
So everyone is using ChatGPT these days but how exactly can you get the most out of it for your research? In this talk I'll show you three killer ways you can take advantage of these new AI magic tricks so you can use them like a research wizard. I'll briefly overview the traps to avoid, and then show you a glimpse of the future where AI does the boring parts of your job for you!
Drs McDonald and Lydecker will provide an overview of the Sydney Informatics Hub at USYD, and how or what they can help with various research projects. You will learn about what Large Language Models (LLMs) are and what they aren’t. The latest buzz around generative Artificial Intelligence (eg ChatGPT) will be reviewed for the opportunities it brings. The presentation will cover existing big tools and models (GPT, PALM, Ilama, Falcon) and ways to use these Chat and Application Programming Interfaces for cool techniques for summarising, rewording, NLP tasks and reviewing. New technologies bring risks such as privacy concerns, IP, data sovereignty and reliability. These risks will be addressed on how to mitigate them using LangChain and alternative LLMs run internally. This field is moving rapidly and this special seminar has been organised to keep us up-to-date with the evolving technologies, their opportunities and risks, and how we can use it to the best of our advantage research settings.
2023-02-23 ChatGPT Masterclass (Youtube)
In this 1 hr masterclass, Dr. Henry Lydecker and Dr. Gordon McDonald from the University of Sydney's Sydney Informatics Hub discuss:
- What ChatGPT is,
- A brief history of how we got here,
- Some ideas on how you can use it to accelerate your research
- Some pitfalls to beware of
- Some ethical/legal/moral and IP considerations for use of the tool.
Small summary of work on predator-prey interactions in fish with Dr. Maud Kent, which was published in Fine-scale behavioural adjustments of prey on a continuum of risk
2018-05-30 OpalMiner at the Transport for NSW Pitchfest
Pitching opalminer.info - an app to analyse your public transport fare usage data, and providing advice on how to save with off-peak fares.
~2018 Inter-rater reliability
Different measures of Inter-rater reliability and when to use them:
- Cohen’s kappa
- Fleiss’ kappa
- Scott’s Pi
- Krippendorff’s alpha See also R code here
2017-12-05 SVD and PCA
An explanation of the relationship and the difference difference between Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
2017-10-06 Using Bayesian Methods to Predict Self-Discharge in the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network
A talk I gave on using Bayesian Logistic Regression on exhaust data from the hospital system to predict Discharge Against Medical Advice (DAMA), at the Health Data Analytics conference in Brisbane.
This work was published in Predictors of Discharge Against Medical Advice in a Tertiary Paediatric Hospital and was followed up by Discharge against medical advice in culturally and linguistically diverse Australian children