Research Follow Position in Visualisation at the Wearable Computer Lab – University of South Australia

POSITION DETAILS:

Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in Visualisation

Job reference: 001367

Employment type: Full part time, 36 month fixed term contract

Classification: Research level BRF/CSRF

Salary range: $85,602 - $120,916 per annum

Your total remuneration will include the above salary plus employer superannuation contributions of up to 17% of salary, and annual leave loading. See more benefits of working for UniSA
http://www.unisa.edu.au/About-UniSA/Working-at-UniSA/Vacancies/

School of Information Technology & Mathematical Sciences, Division of
Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment, University of South Australia

LOCATION:
Mawson Lakes Campus
Please note: appointment is to the University. The appointee may be required to undertake duties at other locations.

FURTHER INFORMATION:
Professor Bruce Thomas
Telephone: +61 8 8302 3464
Email: bruce.thomas@unisa.edu.au

CLOSING DATE:
9.00am Tuesday 9 September 2014

LODGEMENT DETAILS:
Applications must be lodged online through Working at UniSA at
Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in Visualisation (level BRF/CSRF)Job Ref - 001367 
http://www.unisa.edu.au/About-UniSA/Working-at-UniSA/Vacancies/
If you experience any difficulty lodging your application visit FAQs.
For further support contact the Recruitment Hub on (08) 8302 1700 or email recruitment@unisa.edu.au and you will receive a response within one working day.

POSITION DESCRIPTION
Research Fellow / Senior Research Fellow in Visualisation
Advanced Computing Research Centre
School of Information Technology & Mathematical Sciences
Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment
Mawson Lakes Campus
Level BRF/CSRF
3 year fixed term contract

PURPOSE OF POSITION
The Research Fellow / Senior Research Fellow in Visualisation will contribute to the research efforts of the Advanced Computing Research Centre and the School of ITMS, and will develop their expertise through defined research projects linked to the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre (D2D CRC).
The objective is the investigation into visualisation of “Big data” sets. Big data is a collection of data and information sets so large they are difficult to store, search and analyse using traditional processing applications. This project will investigate novel man-machine visualisation tools for extremely large data sets that also cater for a wide variety of information forms.

The first innovation is to support a user’s critical ability to maintain a clear working memory with a manageable cognitive load whilst exploring large data sets. Recalling information for reasoning and comprehension is crucial to successfully exposing hidden information. However, current approaches require users to recognise and memorise hundreds of graph nodes; this is well beyond a reasonable cognitive load. This problem has only become evident, as the size of data sets has rapidly changed from hundreds to millions of nodes. This investigation explores how principles from cognitive psychology can be used in graph visualization to reduce this load by employing physical memory aids, lists and abstract model presentation approaches, with graph sizes of 10,000’s to 100,000’s nodes.

The second innovation is to describe complex and varying data sources in an understandable and productive manner. Data is collected from sources including unstructured data such as: video surveillance, passport photographs, weather reports, news services, and textual messages, but equally there are structured sources such as the following: social networks, telephone records, passport control, and flight manifests. This information and data requires a meta-level of structure for the user. This is useful where the user is required to provide support for the organisation to present wide and varied forms of information.