ACEMS Research Briefs

How do you measure something you can’t see?

That’s the aim of new research just published by ACEMS’ researchers in the Journal of Big Data. Led by Jacinta Holloway Brown from ACEMS at QUT, the researchers developed a new statistical method to predict forest cover in satellite images where portions of the image are blocked by cloud cover. Not only that, the new method also calculates a probability to show how confident the prediction is.

Enormous effort is invested in monitoring the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), but data collection is currently fragmented over dozens of publicly and privately funded organisations, with data collected using different methods and for different purposes. As a result, the data are rarely analysed together.

Water-quality sensors are exposed to changing environments and extreme weather conditions and thus are prone to errors, including failure. These technical errors make data unreliable and untrustworthy and affect performance of any subsequent data analysis. ACEMS researchers, led by Priyanga Dilini Talagala, have proposed a feature based procedure, named oddwater, for detecting technical outliers in water-quality data derived from in situ sensors.

Anomalies can be the main carriers of significant and often critical information, and the identification of anomalies is a key task in many fields such as cyber security, intrusion detection, water quality monitoring, system health monitoring, environmental monitoring. ACEMS researchers, led by Priyanga Dilini Talagala, have proposed a framework that provides early detection of anomalous series within a large collection of streaming time-series data.