UNSW EPICentre staff including Director, Professor Tomasz Bednarz and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Huyen Nguyen are speaking at the YOW! Data Conference. This two-day event focuses on exploring data driven technologies and applications.

YOW! Data 2018 brings together leading industry practitioners and applied researchers working on data driven technologies and applications to explore opportunities and confront challenges that this powerful and transformative field of science offers such as how to handle the rapidly increasing volume and diverse types of data that is becoming available and how organisations, researchers and businnesses can meet the exploding demand for smarter solutions for gathering, handling and analysing data.

Tomasz Bednarz is Professor and Director of Visualisation at UNSW's Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre (EPICentre) and Team Leader at CSIRO's Data61 (Big Data Visualisation and Analytics Team) is presenting 'Visual Analytics on Steroids: High Performance Visualisation, Simulations and AI'.

Abstract: In the time that someone takes to read this abstract, another could solve a detective puzzle if only they had enough quantitative evidence on which to prove their suspicions. But also, one could use visualisation and computational tools like a microscope, to seek a new cure for cancer or predict hospitalisation prevention. In this presentation, we will demonstrate new visual analytics techniques that use various mixed reality approaches that link simulations with collaborative, complex and interactive data exploration, placing the human-in-the-loop. In the recent days, thanks to advances in graphics hardware and compute power (especially GPGPU and modern Big Data / HPC infrastructures), the opportunities are immense, especially in improving our understanding of complex models that represent the real- or hybrid-worlds. Use cases presented will be drawn from ongoing research at CSIRO and Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre (EPICentre) using world class GPU clusters and visualisation capabilities.

Dr Huyen Nguyen Postdoctoral Fellow - EPICentre, UNSW Art & Design is presenting 'Immersive Analytics of Honey Bee Data'.

Abstract: Bees are dying – in recent years an unprecedented decline in honey bee colonies has been seen around the globe. The causes are still largely unknown. At CSIRO, the Global Initiative for Honey Bee Health (GIHH) is an international collaboration of researchers, beekeepers, farmers, and industry set up to research the threats to bee health in order to better understand colony collapse and find solutions that will allow for sustainable crop pollination and food security. Integral to the research effort is RFID tags that are manually fitted to bees. The abundance of data being collected by the thousands of bee-attached sensors as well as additional environmental sensors poses several challenges regarding the interpretation and comprehension of the data, both computationally as well as from a user perspective. In this talk, I will discuss visual analytics techniques that we have been investigating to facilitate an effective path from data to insight. I will particularly focus on interactive and immersive user interfaces that allow for a range of end users to effectively explore the complex sensor data.

To register for the event visit http://data.yowconference.com.au/register/.

For more information on The EPICentre visit http://epicentre.matters.today/.