Melbourne data science company Eliiza has partnered with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) to launch a new business unit, Eliiza Research.
Eliiza Research aims to enhance Australia’s capabilities in machine learning and artificial intelligence associated with gravitational-wave astronomy. As part of the deal, Eliiza CEO James Wilson will also join the OzGrav Research translation committee.
Eliiza said the partnership also aims to capitalise on the first detections of gravitational waves in 2015 to understand the extreme physics of black holes and warped spacetime.
The gravitational waves were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) observatory and Virgo interferometer, after some fifty years of efforts to directly prove the existence of the waves.
The company said the unit’s work hopes to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers in the area, as well as allow Eliiza’s staff to apply their skills to this area of research.
The partnership came after an earlier collaboration on research into Noise Characterisation, with Eliiza’s data-science team developing a multi-label sound classifier to accurately identify various anthropogenic, animal and natural noise sources.
Eliiza Research will kick off the OzGrav collaboration with the delivery of a technical document and presentation showing the proof-of-principle that this noise characterisation method can be successfully applied to LIGO/Virgo data.
Eliiza will also provide OzGrav researchers with coaching, mentoring and networking to assist with a potential career path for corporate work in the future.
“This partnership provides a platform for our team to work on ground breaking research, away from the corporate projects that they embed themselves in for months,” Eliiza CEO James Wilson said.
“This provides a great balance to their work, whilst also helping to develop future talent from within the research community and highlighting the pathways that are available in the industry. Personally, I am excited to provide industry insights back into the OzGrav Research Committee.”
OzGrav chief investigator and associate professor at Monash University Paul Lasky said, “The advanced techniques developed in the initial research have the potential to lead to new cross-disciplinary applications in communications and engineering, contribute to Australia’s science and research priorities, and bring economic value to broader information and communication industries in Australia.
“We are thrilled to be working alongside Eliiza to leverage their knowledge of machine learning and industry while supporting their team’s learning and development.”ADVERTISING
Eliiza lead data scientist Kathryn Collier said, “To work alongside the next generation of technologists across so many institutions via OzGrav is exciting. I am looking forward to building relationships with the next crop of data scientists, and bridging the academia and corporate gap, especially for women and gender minority groups.”
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