Digital Ecosystems Business Intelligence Institute (DEBII)
The Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute (DEBII, debii.curtin.edu.au) has been a Curtin University Tier One Research Institute of Excellence since 2006. This title is the result of a rigorous peer review process and open competition. The Institute incorporates the University Research Centre of Excellence on Extended Enterprises and Business Intelligence (CEEBI), International Research Centre for Stringology and Application (CSR) and an AoRE (Area of Research Excellence) on Frontier Information Technologies (FIT).
DEBII is one of Australia’s leading research centres with more than 75 researchers operating at the cutting edge of diverse and exciting domains. DEBII has a unique international position working at distinct intersections of IT and business, encapsulated by the motto of “creating value by making connections”.
DEBII’s research projects excel by an ability to connect various disciplines and international high profile researchers to diverse industry problems, which allows the Institute to derive highly unique solutions. Whilst actively pursuing research in many areas, its specific research strategy is to develop excellence in broad fields. There are two primary parts: Emerging Underlying Technologies and Domain Knowledge Rich Ecosystems (digital ecosystems, or problem domain applications)
Where the Emerging Underlying Technologies research is concerned, there are three unifying elements that underpin digital ecosystems and business intelligence:
- Cyber information engineering
- Human space computing
- Data Mining and Semantic Technologies
Within the Domain Knowledge Rich Ecosystems (Problem Domain Applications) research, DEBII examines the ways that emerging underlying technologies support different problem domains (domain specific digital ecosystems) including:
- Digital business ecosystems
- Digital health and medical systems
- Digital classrooms, e-education and e-learning ecosystems
- Social, cultural, economical sustainability and e-Humanities
- Digital Resources, mining, oil and gas, logistics, industrial IT and sustainable development
- Transport and Logistics.
The Learning Technologies Lab is responsible for the Digital classrooms, e-education and e-learning ecosystems research and focuses on the use of state of the art technologies in solving advanced problems in the educational domain in collaboration with key players in the Australian educational landscape. One of the projects the Lab is working on is automated essay grading, where a combination of (structured and unstructured) data mining and semantic technologies are used to develop the first workable solution to this previously unsolved problem.
Other topics addressed by the Lab is delivering demand driven education based on mining of employment databases, as well as developing employability matching and various distance learning projects that speak to the imagination of the community. The lab has also recently started looking into leveraging web mining technologies to study usage behaviour, LOM and SCORM data of e-learning portals in order to optimise this data in terms of interface, content delivery, mass customisation and competency-centric curriculum development.
Learning in the World 