Investigators' Blog
Shaun Hendy #nofly2018 update
As many of you will be aware, our director Shaun Hendy has been travelling a lot differently this year. Despite being a frequent domestic and international traveller, Shaun decided that for 2018 he would set an example and highlight his concern about climate change by not using air travel for the entire calendar year. The hashtag #nofly2018 was born and, from the first day in January, he has walked the talk – effectively turning his back on flying as a means to get around, favouring instead modes of land transport that emit less carbon.
Various news outlets have covered Shaun’s journey over the year, including Radio New Zealand and the New Zealand Herald. So, now that we’re into September, how is he getting on? Well, very impressively according to the stats. By mid-September 2017, Shaun had made 10 return flights from Auckland to Wellington, at a cost of 2.66 metric tonnes of CO2 (equivalent)*. So far this year he has been to Wellington and back six times (once by car, three times by train, and twice by bus) at a cost of just 0.458 metric tonnes of CO2 (equivalent)*. What is more he’s got more done in Wellington this year: in 2017 his 10 flights gave him 10 business days in Wellington, while in 2018 he has had 21 working days down the capital.
Not flying has its advantages
In addition to reducing his carbon footprint, Shaun says one of the great advantages to taking it slower by road or rail is that you can actually get a lot of work done on the way and plan in more meetings with investigators in one trip. Te Pūnaha Matatini, a national Centre of Research Excellence, has investigators spread across New Zealand.
“Over the last two weeks [for example] I have travelled #nofly2018 style from Auckland to Queenstown and back again,” said Shaun. “It was great to catch up with a number of investigators on the way through. I spent a beautiful sunny day at the University of Canterbury, catching up with [Te Pūnaha Matatini investigators] Alex James, Jeanette McLeod, Mike Plank, and Audrey Lustig, as well as dropping by to see Rebecca Turner at Scion. The conversations that day were very timely as I have gotten involved with MPI’s Mycoplasma Bovis Eradication Science Advisory Group to help them think about how they can use the various data sets they have at their disposal.”
Electric vehicles becoming more feasible
On his most recent trip, Shaun was also sponsored by Yoogo Share, an electric vehicle share company that has 100 electric vehicles based in eight locations in Christchurch.
“They lent me one of their Hyundai IONIQ’s for five days,” said Shaun. “I had about 1,000km to drive, including the odd hill or two. The IONIQ doesn’t yet have the range of a petrol vehicle. Depending on the terrain, you’ll get around 100-160 km between charges, although running the heater will shave 10-15% off this. A fast charge takes around 15 minutes and will boost your battery up to about 80% capacity, but if you’ve got another 10 minutes or so you can charge it up to 95%.”
Luckily, there is a growing network of charging stations across New Zealand, which means electric vehicle users can get to most places without too much trouble.
“From Christchurch, I charged up at Geraldine, then Tekapo, followed by a big charge at Twizel to make sure I made it over the Lindis pass, and then a final top up in Cromwell,” said Shaun. “The IONIQ was great to drive – I had no problems taking it up over the Crown Range Rd. Definitely give it a go next time you are in Christchurch.”
Follow Shaun on Twitter for #nofly2018 updates!
Keep up-to-date with Shaun Hendy’s travels on Twitter by following the #nofly2018 hashtag.
Heading back to Christchurch today in the @yoogo_nz Hyundai IONIQ. It’s been a great climate-friendly few days #nofly2018 pic.twitter.com/sleS3kUEBI
— Shaun Hendy (@hendysh) August 19, 2018
*Calculated using the Enrivo-Mark Travel Emissions Calculator.
Interns work to enhance use of te reo Māori
In the summer of 2016-2017, Te Hiku Media and Te Pūnaha Matatini co-funded a number of student internships – work from which led to the development of Kōrero Māori – a project to teach machines how to speak te reo Māori.
One of the interns was Jamie Chow, a conjoint BComm/BEng (Honours) degree student from the University of Auckland. Jamie’s work on Te Hiku’s Data Analytics and Visualisation Project involved using online audience data to measure the performance of the organisation’s digital platform, matching it with other information such as demographics and geographical data.
Internship leads to ongoing employment opportunity
Following his 10-week summer internship, Jamie continued working on the project for Te Hiku in part-time employment over the course of 2017.
“We kept Jamie on board,” says Te Hiku’s R&D Scientist and Engineer Keoni Mahelona. “He had the internship then we hired him on contract for about 6 months or so. Just casually, furthering the work that he did for that project. That was really useful.”
Jamie was able to create visualisations of the data that allowed Te Hiku staff to quickly understand and interpret the behaviour of their audience. Staff can now immediately examine their content for audience engagement, allowing them to adapt their future programming.
“The project mainly involved developing tools to obtain usage data for their online platform and present this data in a suitable form to their staff, producers, and content creators,” says Jamie.
“My project was very self-driven so it was always challenging and engaging. It was clear even from the beginning that I would learn a lot throughout the project. Te Hiku Media seemed to be pleased with the results and I’m happy they’re using and benefiting from my work.
“Overall, it was a great experience and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to work with some awesome people.”
Jamie Chow, Te Pūnaha Matatini 2016-17 summer student intern (centre), with Keoni Mahelona, Te Hiku Media (left) and Shaun Hendy, Te Pūnaha Matatini (right).
About the Kōrero Māori project
Te Hiku’s Data Analytics and Visualisation Project led to discussions about the need for ICT tools for te reo Māori. Working together, Keoni’s team developed the Kōrero Māori project to create computer language models for te reo Māori – the basic tools which will allow machines to be able to transcribe and speak the language.
Keoni is optimistic about how Te Hiku and Te Pūnaha Matatini can collaborate in terms of research direction in the future.
“I do look forward to us continuing to work together… and doing research around Te Reo, language processing and also looking to the languages of the Pacific – because there’s a lot of similarities,” says Keoni. “If we can turn these into machine models, perhaps we can learn something about the evolution of our languages.
Keoni says that Te Pūnaha Matatini has been very helpful and open in terms of how the data are managed.
“It’s about managing data in a way that aligns with our tikanga and our values, as Māori and as a Māori organisation and as indigenous people. Our language is our culture. It’s our identity. We’re talking about giving that to a machine and I guess the question comes, well, who owns that data or who owns the machines that have access to that data,” explains Keoni.
“As indigenous people, we want to maintain some sovereignty… and Te Pūnaha Matatini has been helpful in terms of having quite a broad and open understanding of those aspects of the project.”
Students thrilled with summer internship experiences
Students who’ve taken part in previous summer internship programmes run by Te Pūnaha Matatini have expressed a high level of satisfaction with their experiences. Indeed, the 10-week paid internship programme provides an excellent opportunity for students to hone their data analytics skills while working for organisations in a real-world setting.
A total of 21 undergraduate and postgraduate university students from around New Zealand were selected for our 2017-18 programme. Divided into teams, the interns were placed on a wide range of projects working for various organisations, including Iwi, government and private firms based in either Auckland or Wellington.
There were some exciting new opportunities. One team, for instance, were placed on a project with Dragonfly Data Science and Te Hiku Media based in Wellington. Their internship involved work related to Te Hiku’s Kōrero Māori project, developing language tools that will enable speech recognition and natural language processing of te reo Māori. This requires the collection of more than 100,000 sentences and 250 hours of Māori language corpus. Once complete, it aims to provide these language tools to the Māori ICT industry.
Interns share their thoughts and details of their work
One of the student interns on this project was William Asiata, a BSc Mathematics graduate from the University of Canterbury and a current Master of Information Technology student at the University of Auckland.
“As a result of the internship I was able to generate a corpus of all te reo Māori spoken in Parliament which will be included in the greater corpus used to train the digital natural language processor language model,” said William. “As an interesting by-product we also produced some statistics about the historical usage of te reo in Parliament. I had the opportunity to learn and practice the Python and R programming languages and exercise data processing skills.
“I believe that it was a great opportunity for an inexperienced student to sharpen one’s skill set, to clarify future career goals, and to gain direct insight into the ICT and data science industries through practical work experience on meaningful, high-impact projects and the chance to learn directly from working professionals,” he added.
Check out our latest guest blog! This one is by maths grad William Asiata about his internship with @dflydsci, @TeHiku and @PunahaMatatini, working on the #KōreroMāori project & analyzing the rapid recent growth in the use of te reo by NZ parliamentarians. https://t.co/oxI0kuoPMp pic.twitter.com/POhuQ6Q9fQ
— Te Pūnaha Matatini (@PunahaMatatini) March 1, 2018
Another team worked on a project supporting research by Kate Hannah, Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Executive Manager, into the historical representation of women in science.
Emma Vitz, a statistics and psychology graduate from Victoria University of Wellington assigned to this project, researched an algorithm that classifies people by gender according to their first name, and blogged about the ethical pitfalls of such an approach. Emma also began research into networks underlying science collaboration in New Zealand. “I particularly enjoyed using both R and Python in the internship, and collaborating with researchers and other interns from Te Pūnaha Matatini,” said Emma.
Comp programs that learn from past experience/data are all in vogue. However, as data science consultant @EmmaVitz explains, such machine learning can reinforce racism when crunching population-based numbers. Check out her timely & thought-provoking piece: https://t.co/IKYI6juu7X pic.twitter.com/c6kEe8wVwI
— Te Pūnaha Matatini (@PunahaMatatini) February 1, 2018
Also on the team was Beth Rust, a BA (Hons) history graduate from Victoria University of Wellington, who conducted a literature review of the background and achievements of women in science.
“Women are everywhere in science,” said Beth. I noticed a few trends: a lot of early women scientists tended to be in botany – then later women dominated home science – now they are everywhere. I’ve also learnt a lot these past ten weeks, not just in terms of the history of science but also in a more general sense,” she added. “I’m very grateful for the experience and everything it’s taught me.”
It was a privilege hosting history grad Beth Rust over the summer. Check out her blog – an in-depth investigation into the extensive contributions of Māori & Pacific women in science over the years & the importance of their representation within the field. https://t.co/op9fZSXnSh pic.twitter.com/9rv31a86iz
— Te Pūnaha Matatini (@PunahaMatatini) February 11, 2018
Te Pūnaha Matatini Whanau member Stephen Merry, who is pursuing a PhD in mathematics at the University of Canterbury, also took part in the internship programme working with the Social Investment Agency in Wellington.
“I worked on two projects,” said Stephen. “The first investigated the scope of data held inside and outside of the Integrated Data Infrastructure, and the second examined how people’s use of health services is affected by the services’ accessibility. This internship gave me the opportunity to work in a different environment, and I felt a genuine sense of purpose completing the projects,” he added. “My colleagues in the Social Investment Agency were enormously helpful and understanding throughout, and the experience overall is something I would recommend to anyone interested.”
Following the programme, interns were invited to blog about their work for the Te Pūnaha Matatini website and these articles resulted in very positive feedback on Twitter – with even some New Zealand parliamentarians chiming in!
We love hearing about this stuff! 🤓One of the lesser-known perks of hosting a large publicly-available text corpus is seeing the cool projects that come out of it. (For those playing along at home, you can find #Hansard reports on our website: https://t.co/h8GdImYvud) #nzpol https://t.co/s2RaMq0hrN
— NZ Parliament (@NZParliament) March 8, 2018
Project to boost scientist mātauranga capability
A Te Pūnaha Matatini research project that aims to improve the way in which scientists connect and work with Māori has been awarded $100,000 in funding by New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE).
The project, part of MBIE’s Te Pūnaha Hihiko: Vision Mātauranga Capability Fund, will be led by Dr Tara McAllister (pictured above), an environmental scientist with the University of Auckland, in collaboration with ecologist Dr Cate Macinnis-Ng and earth systems scientist Dr Daniel Hikuroa, Principal Investigators with Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland. Importantly, the project team will partner with Mahaanui Kurataiao Limited, an environmental and resource management advisory firm based in Canterbury.
While there are some excellent examples of scientists engaging well with Māori communities, there are also instances when connecting has been a struggle.
“We want to look at how we make those interactions more successful, more productive, and more workable for everybody involved,” Dr Macinnis-Ng says.
“So we are going to co-develop a project with an Iwi group, where we’ll look at what their science needs are, and work out who in our field can deliver those things. By co-developing the project, it’s all about what the needs are of that group, rather than imposing what scientists want to do.”
The project will be conducted in a reflective way so the project team can understand what works best for the different groups involved. It will also develop te reo science materials appropriate for school curricula.
“We’ll be developing some teaching materials for kura kaupapa to make science more accessible to everyone,” says Dr Macinnis-Ng.
The project will be very important to Te Pūnaha Matatini’s wider research programme, says Shaun Hendy, the Centre’s Director and Professor of Physics at the University of Auckland.
“Building close engagement with Māori communities and learning about the mātauranga of complex systems is a wonderful opportunity for us,” he says.
“Not only will this project be essential to us in meeting our research goals, it will also provide social, economic, and environmental benefits to Aotearoa New Zealand.”
Project lead Dr Tara McAllister (Te Aitanga a Mahaki) out in the field. Tara has a strong research focus on freshwater ecology and management.
Testing large-scale predator control in Hawke’s Bay
New Zealand has an excellent record of conserving its native flora and fauna through pest control measures, especially in large uninhabited areas. Predator Free 2050 is a bold initiative that aims to rid the country of its most damaging invasive predators. However, to completely eliminate such predators from our shores, new and ambitious approaches are needed.
Implementing effective predator control over large areas
New Zealand’s unique and diverse native species of flora and fauna are extremely vulnerable to invasive mammals. Our often-publicised successes in conserving the country’s biodiversity by managing pests has mainly been restricted to large uninhabited areas. Meanwhile, large tracts of land owned by private individuals remain relatively unprotected.
When it comes to land management decisions such as pest control actions, careful negotiations are required with a wide range of stakeholders with differing views – from cat-lovers to rabbit-haters – so that agreements can be reached.
Experience has shown there are minimum thresholds for landholder participation in predator control measures for them to be successful. In practice, coordinated community efforts are required so that pest reinvasion from a few untreated properties does not compromise pest control achieved by others.
Another crucial element is biological connectivity between properties – the establishment of ‘safe passage’ corridors crossing landowner boundaries greatly assists in the dispersal of native species between fragments of suitable habitat. Large-scale pest control is therefore a spatial issue with social, environmental, and economic components.
The spread model is still being developed to provide more functionality for managers. In particular, we are investigating the ways in which landholders influence one another, how agencies influence landholders, and the presence of key influential landholders who might help catalyze actions are the current focus of research. Ultimately, the aim of the model is to improve strategic planning for mammal control at regional scales. Also, this model serves as a template for future dynamic maps of other mammal species.
Large-scale Cape to City research project in Hawke’s Bay
Te Pūnaha Matatini investigators Audrey Lustig, Mike Plank and Alex James, from the University of Canterbury, are involved in a large-scale predator control initiative covering 26,000 hectares of agricultural land in Hawke’s Bay, part of a wide range of research activities referred to as the Cape to City research project by the Hawke’s Bay City Council.
“This is just a start for a much more ambitious project that proposes a vision to eliminate invasive predators from the entire country,” says Audrey. “In this work, we develop a generic modeling approach as a planning tool for predicting the abundance and the likely persistence of four New Zealand top mammalian predators in the light of potential changes in management effort across human-dominated landscape.”
The first part of the project aims to generate a computer model for predicting the distribution and abundance of mammalian species across the landscape, the ways in which animals move from their natal sites, and how their distributions and abundance are affected by control interventions.
Such modelling can help inform managers on the likelihood of success of a specific pest control action (assuming every landholder participates in the control action). It also allows exploration of some of the mechanisms by which mammal populations might recover after control operations.
Importance of multi-stakeholder engagement
The work builds on a pre-existing knowledge base and data acquired by the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, Department of Conservation, Manaaki Whenua and the Biological Heritage Challenge to bring about practical improvements in mammalian pest management in New Zealand.
“Such inter-organisational joint effort is common in New Zealand, but to me, what was critical was to bring a more practical insight into my research,” says Audrey. “In particular, the provision of direct feedback from decision-makers forms an integral part of the learning process and enriches my research experiences and outcomes, while providing useful information to the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.”
For further details about this project, please contact us today.
New report shows mothers take pay cut to have a baby
A new report co-authored by Dr Isabelle Sin, Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research (pictured), has revealed that mothers experience an average 4.4% wage decrease after having a baby.
The report’s findings made the front page of the New Zealand Herald print edition, with commentary from Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles – also a Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator – and her husband and mathematician Professor Steven Galbraith, both from the University of Auckland. Check out the article here. Isabelle Sin was also interviewed on RNZ’s Nine To Noon – listen in here.
How do scientific articles and patents gather in importance?
Te Pūnaha Matatini researchers are collaborating across disciplines to develop novel tools that allow us to better understand trends underlying the citation of scientific papers and patents, a key indicator of their subsequent impact or importance.
PhD student Kyle Higham and his supervisors Ulrich Zuelicke (Uli) and Michele Governale from Victoria University of Wellington, and innovation economist Adam Jaffe from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, have been researching how patents and scientific articles accumulate citations. Mapping the observed dynamics to a well-known network model, they were able to improve on previous studies by controlling for ‘citation inflation’ – an effect caused by the ever-increasing rate at which patents or articles are produced by inventors and researchers.
“As a result, we were able to reliably extract crucial network-model parameters and obtained extremely good agreement between data and model predictions for citation distributions,” says Uli. “Our work has proved to be a useful basis for gaining a deeper understanding of citation dynamics and is being utilised by us and others in the field to design improved network-model descriptions.”
Study suggests current rate of innovation faster than ever
The “icing on the cake”, says Uli, is that their study considered citation dynamics within specialised technology sectors for patents and individual physics research fields for articles.
“We were able to identify faster-moving technologies and research fields based on their faster rate of obsolescence exhibited in the citation dynamics.”
“Interestingly, we also found evidence for obsolescence times to have become shorter for physics articles published in 2000 compared with older ones from 1990. This indicates a general trend for the research frontier to move faster now than in the past, which is an interesting finding whose social origin deserves further exploration.”
Research helps to inform science and innovation policies
Uli explains there are good reasons to study citation dynamics.
“Research on citation dynamics can provide tools with which to inform rational science and innovation policies. Such research also underpins the design of meaningful and robust informetric impact measures.”
“To us, citation data provide a fingerprint or reflection of knowledge generation as a social endeavour. Citations could be, or are being, mined to understand [for example] geographical and social patterns of knowledge diffusion through communities of inventors and academics, as well as historical trends and drivers for knowledge generation and consumption.”
Keen to learn more about this project?
If you’re interested in finding out more about this project, please refer to the team’s most recent study findings reported in Physical Review E and Journal of Informetrics.
Social network analytics to aid vulnerable kids
Te Pūnaha Matatini investigators Mike Plank, Alex James, Jeanette McLeod, and postdoc research fellow Daniel Lond, are using social network analysis to assess risk in vulnerable children in New Zealand.
Collaborating with our stakeholders in the government sector
Working with an extensive data set, the team is exploring how the Ministry for Social Development (MSD) can improve their measures of the risk of harm to vulnerable children, for use by front-line practitioners. Directly funded by MSD, the researchers aim to develop tools that can be used to protect at-risk children and improve their lives.
The project uses relationship data pertaining to children who have had contact with Child, Youth and Family (CYF) from 2005 to 2016, and includes all relationships observed by CYF staff in their work with that child and their family. CYF has since been succeeded by the Ministry for Children, Oranga Tamariki (MCOT).
Using network science to develop tools that can improve outcomes
Networks are constructed to map the relationships between different individuals within the database. By examining these networks we are identifying key relationship risk factors that lead to children being of high estimated concern.
Preliminary results suggest that this approach can provide insight to help social worker decision making. The tool can be used by CYF staff, in addition to their existing experience and protocols, to assist in making real-time assessments regarding in-depth investigation or intervention.
Please contact us today if you would like to find out more about this project.
Te Reo Māori in New Zealand Parliament
As one of two summer 2017-18 student interns for the Kōrero Māori project with Dragonfly Data Science, Te Hiku Media and Te Pūnaha Matatini, we were assigned to help collect corpus of te reo Māori text that would be used to train the written language model component of a te reo Māori computer natural language processing engine. When ready, the natural language processor will be used as the base for making software like Apple’s artificially intelligent ‘Siri’, that will be capable of understanding te reo Māori.
One text source in particular was identified that is publicly available online and known to contain te reo Māori – that is the New Zealand Parliamentary Debates as recorded in the Hansard reports.
The written record of Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) make up over 700 volumes of text that span from 1854 to the present day, and daily reports continue to be published online within a fews hours of each new thing spoken in Parliament.
Working through the Hansard
A variety of challenges were encountered while programming an algorithm that could successfully sort through the text in all the volumes, accounting for a variety of text structures, and detecting and extracting te reo Māori.
Hansard characteristics:
- Hansard volumes prior to 1867 are assembled from newspaper publications and the like – the Hansard reporters first began their work in 1867.
- Prior to volume 410 (1977), speeches were not always directly quoted and were often written in a narrative style. It is a possibility that at times te reo was spoken but only recorded as a narrative in english. From volume 410 onwards, all speeches are directly quoted.
- Prior to volume 483 (1987), the volumes are published using non-digital means. Digital text has been generated from optical character recognition of scans – OCR from the earlier volumes is not the best. From volume 483 (1987) onwards the debates are published using computer word processing software.
- In 1994 the Hansard reports begin to use macronised vowels for te reo Māori words.
- From volume 606 (2003) onwards, the daily Hansard reports are available online as HTML formatted web pages.
In the end, the programme extracts segments of speech that have a high percentage of Māori words. It also counts all the Māori, non-Māori and ambiguous (e.g. ‘he’, ‘to’, ‘a’) words that are spoken within each day of debates.
Across the 700+ volumes, the programme has sorted through over 420 million words to detect about 7400 speech segments that are at least 50% te reo and have a combined total of about 390,000 Māori words.
History of te reo in Parliament
Several interesting discoveries were made after examining the result and making a graph (see figure below):
- Up until the 1980s the proportion of te reo Māori speech in Parliament was barely anything – less than 0.1% for more than 130 years. However over the last 2-3 decades the growth trend in the percentage of te reo spoken in Parliament is very remarkable, even reaching as high as 2% in a year.
- We found that Māori words make up about 0.2-0.4% of what people say in Parliament on average if they aren’t speaking in te reo Māori – most probably common words like names.
- A cluster of te reo speeches around the 1940s.
- Several MP speeches that include other Polynesian languages are counted to contain about 50% – 70% “Māori” words – this is due to similarity between languages and alphabets.
Figure courtesy of Te Hiku Media.
Interpretation of the growth trend
Viewing Parliament and the New Zealand House of Representatives in the context of an institution that endeavours to represent the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand, the kinds of social interactions that occur within Parliament can also be interpreted as a general indicator, as an approximation, and as the emergent result of the many kinds of cultural interactions and social dynamics that are happening on the ground across broader New Zealand society as a whole. In this sense, the amount of te reo spoken in Parliament, or any language for that matter, reflects the current position that language has in society. The growth in te reo Māori used in Parliament appears to parallel the time period from when Te Kohanga Reo and Te Reo Māori revitalisation movement began, as well as from the time when the process of settling Tiriti grievances began.
What next?
Over the summer we interns managed to aggregate several thousand te reo sentences combined, including from sources such as the historical Māori newspapers. However, over 100,000 sentences are required to train a good language model, so there is still a lot more corpus gathering to be done.
The program scripted for the Hansard debates can be run again and again as new debates are published to continue growing the corpus of te reo Māori. The script can also be adapted and reworked to sort through other text sources that consist of paragraphs and sentences, particularly bilingual text.
In addition, with a little more work on this particular code we can start to keep account of:
- The percentage of Māori spoken by each Member of Parliament over time
- The percentage of Māori spoken by each Party over time
- Count other Pacific/Polynesian languages when spoken in Parliament
Closing thoughts
The sudden upswing in te reo in Parliament in the last 20 – 30 years is astounding. From practically 0 to 1-2% in a couple of decades, imagine what it could look like in years to come:
- When the percentage of te reo spoken in Parliament begins to match the size of the Māori population (~15%).
- When the percentage of te reo spoken in Parliament approaches 50%, and the nation is almost 100% Māori bilingual.
No doubt, machines that have learnt to kōrero Māori will play an important part in such developments as we continue the journey onward into the technological future. Performing this mahi as a tauira intern for the Kōrero Māori project has been a great learning experience. I have been able to learn from professionals and sharpen my programming and data processing skills all for this deeply meaningful kaupapa with compelling implications for the digital future of languages indigenous to Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, and I am very humbled to have had the opportunity to contribute to its development.
Author
William Asiata is a BSc Mathematics graduate from the University of Canterbury and a current Master of Information Technology student at the University of Auckland. William is passionate about the development and application of social choice algorithms to the construction of social networking systems, and how this will impact the future of civic technologies. William is also interested in the social evolution of peoples across Oceania.
Ka pai Siouxsie!
The 2018 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Gala Awards were held in Auckland last night, with much-admired Kristine Bartlett, rest-home carer and pay equity campaigner in the healthcare sector, taking out the top honour.
Kristine’s fellow nominees included Mike King, well-known comedian turned mental health and suicide prevention campaigner, and our very own Siouxsie Wiles, award-winning microbiologist and science communicator, and principal investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini.
Siouxsie’s research involves diseases that affect vulnerable children, in particular how to reduce the high rates of infectious diseases in New Zealand kids.
Professor Shaun Hendy, Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini, says it was was an incredible achievement for Siouxsie to be named as one of the three finalists for Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year.
“She is an inspiring role model for everyone at Te Pūnaha Matatini and we are all incredibly proud to work with her,” says Shaun. “Siouxsie is driven by her curiosity about the world and a desire to make a difference in people’s lives. She thinks very deeply about the ethics and impact of her work, and this is evident in the problems she chooses to study and the approach she takes to this study. She is also a passionate believer in making science transparent to the public, and strives to make it accessible to everyone. Siouxsie works hard to make it so that science is something for everyone, not just a privileged few.”
Congratulations Siouxsie for your magnificent mahi and for being a great Kiwi. Aroha nui!
If you haven’t already seen the official awards’ video tribute to Siouxsie, here it is: