Deakin University

Multimedia research has been embraced by a number of areas across the university.

The School of Contemporary Arts offers a variety of education and research programs across a broad range of professional arts and new media disciplines. The School combines skills development within individual practice with collaboration across disciplines producing graduates who are skilled, flexible and highly employable in the constantly changing arts and media industries. Staff at the School are professional artists and practitioners who provide tuition and research supervision which emphasises innovation and is strongly informed by up-to-date industry experience. Strong links are maintained with industry through ongoing partnerships which include an association with Optus Education TV Channel, participation by the School in eMERGE (Victoria's co-operative multimedia centre) and the Warrnambool multimedia centre.

Within the Institute of Disability Studies members of the Equity Access Research and Development team, have worked on various projects relating to technology and communications. A development project that has involved direct participation of people with disabilities has been Multiweb - a web browser specifically geared for people with disability. Disability Studies researchers teamed up with technicians from Management Information Systems (on the Burwood Campus of Deakin University) to develop, trial and modify a browser that would enable people with disabilities to have easier access to the world wide web.

Knowledge acquisition and management is an important research area within the School of Mathematics and Computing which is a key part of one of Deakin's research priority areas, Information Technology for the Information Economy. Knowledge is a critical asset in the modern economy. A new ARC Large Grant (Professor Geoff Webb) is expected to deliver a new family of data mining techniques with low application costs that deliver high levels of prediction accuracy. These techniques have potential application in many domains, including commerce, public health, science, and public administration. This project will refine these techniques to improve the accuracy and comprehensibility of the knowledge they infer, reduce the computational resources that they require, and extend the types of data to which they may be successfully applied. The resulting refined techniques will help Australian organisations effectively utilise the untapped knowledge implicit in their vast data repositories.

At Deakin's School of Architecture and Building in Geelong, Professor Mark Burry is using modified aeronautical engineering software to translate the soaring curves of the internationally renowned Sagrada Familiar Church into working designs for Barcelona's construction team, and engaging the minds of a new generation of young architects in the unique challenges posed by the world's most radical piece of architecture.

As part of this ongoing work, Professor Burry and the School were invited to produce a multimedia CD ROM for the Espai Gudi - the principal Gaudi museum - the subject being a visual description of the origins of the geometry used by the architect Antoni Gaudi at the Sagrada Familiar Church and the way they were applied to the building. The project addresses a single question: 'how do you show and explain complex art through art and not words, and to a wider audience, and transcending many cultures?'

Deakin Research Services
Deakin University