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Search Marsden awards 2008–2017

Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017

Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2014

Title: Auckland lakes as climate dipsticks: producing unique insights into the nature and drivers of the past 117,000 years of climate change

Recipient(s): Associate Professor PC Augustinus | PI | The University of Auckland
Professor F Sirocko | PI | Johannes Gutenberg University
Dr M Danišík | AI | The University of Waikato
Professor IF Snowball | AI | Uppsala University
Dr TM Shanahan | AI | The University of Texas at Austin
Associate Professor PA Shane | AI | The University of Auckland
Professor AK Schmitt | AI | University of California, Los Angeles
Professor RM Newnham | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr HM Roberts | AI | Aberystwyth University

Public Summary: The response of past terrestrial ecosystems to rapid climate change is central to the debate surrounding the consequences of future climate change in a warming world. However, although much has been learned regarding the mechanisms of abrupt climate change, it is unclear how these events are generated and transmitted. Part of the problem lies in the paucity of accurately and precisely dated high-resolution records of climate change needed to identify the degree of synchrony between these events throughout the global climate system. The episodes of rapid change over the past 117,000 years form part of the solution, although they best expressed in climate records from the polar and tropical regions. The Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes are a data sparse and poorly-understood part of the global climate system, although our Auckland volcanic lake sediments will enable us to produce a unique, continuous and high-resolution record of past climate variability spanning the period of interest. We will use a novel approach involving a range of quantitative sedimentological, geochemical and biotic estimates of past climate with the development of robust age models. The output will be an unparalleled record of the nature, timing, rate and consequences of past climate change from the Southwest Pacific.

Total Awarded: $800,000

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Associate Professor PC Augustinus

Panel: ESA

Project ID: 14-UOA-040


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2016

Title: Automatic Design of Heuristics for Dynamic Arc Routing Problem with Genetic Programming

Recipient(s): Dr Y Mei | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Professor J Branke | AI | University of Warwick

Public Summary: The Arc Routing Problem (ARP) is important in fields such as logistics and transportation. It aims to find minimum-cost vehicle routes to serve arcs of a graph. In real life, unpredicted events (e.g. traffic jam/accidents) can occur while executing the routes, leading to dynamic ARP. Traditional optimisation approaches cannot effectively respond to real-time changes in dynamic ARP.

Routing policy is a promising heuristic approach to dynamic ARP that can immediately determine the next destination for a vehicle once it finishes the current service. The effectiveness of a routing policy depends on a variety of interdependent factors. Therefore, manually designing effective routing policies is difficult. Using ideas from biological evolution, genetic programming (GP) has achieved success in automatically designing heuristics for many dynamic problems.

This project aims to propose novel GP techniques to automatically design routing policies in dynamic ARP. We will develop new strategies to address issues caused by multiple kinds of interacting decisions (assigning arcs to vehicles and picking the next arc), huge search space and multiple conflicting objectives (e.g. effectiveness and interpretability). We expect the proposed algorithms to provide effective and understandable routing policies for a wide range of dynamic ARP problems by discovering and reusing common knowledge.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: Victoria University of Wellington

Contact Person: Dr Y Mei

Panel: MIS

Project ID: 16-VUW-079


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2014

Title: Automatically deriving the model of digital ink sketches

Recipient(s): Dr RV Blagojevic | PI | Massey University
Associate Professor BE Plimmer | AI | The University of Auckland

Public Summary: Diagrams are critical to many areas including design, technical documentation, and education, as they have the ability to represent ideas or information in a visual and unconstrained manner. While computer supported diagramming is superficially attractive, to be useful it needs significant improvement. Enabling computer understanding of hand-drawn diagrams (such as via digital pens) is one way to achieve this. With recognition algorithms to automatically understand sketches, advanced functions can be added to software. The key is accurate recognition of the sketch. The overall aim of this research is to automatically infer the meaning — a conceptual model — of digital ink sketches. Understanding the high-level meaning of a sketch is an important part of sketch recognition; this currently requires experts to define the sketch semantics, which is incredibly tedious. In addition, current approaches to grouping sketched components, an important precursor to high-level understanding, lack effectiveness and scalability. This project aims to automatically and robustly perform high-level recognition and grouping. These advances in sketch recognition have the potential for wider implications in related areas such as annotation, touch, gesture, and scene recognition.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: Massey University

Contact Person: Dr RV Blagojevic

Panel: MIS

Project ID: 14-MAU-025


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2017

Title: AviaNZ: Making Sure New Zealand Birds Are Heard

Recipient(s): Professor SR Marsland | PI | Massey University Manawatu
Associate Professor IC Castro | AI | Massey University Manawatu

Public Summary: New Zealand has amazing birdlife: nocturnal parrots, birds that can't fly, and birds that turn up after 50 years of being thought extinct. Unfortunately, many native species require wildlife management programmes, and they are hard to monitor: they are often well-camouflaged or nocturnal. How can you discern what works in wildlife management if you don't know how many animals there are and how the number changes?

Most birds make sound, and so there is a real need for a system that can detect, recognise, analyse, and infer bird populations using automated sound recorders. However, data from these recorders is noisy and extremely variable in factors such as volume. In this project we will work to reliably detect and recognise birdsong from these recordings, and estimate the abundance of birds from the number of calls, by developing mathematical and computational tools to analyse sound, and combining them with ecological experiments to understand how calls relate to population estimates. This inter-disciplinary project will combine fundamental and practical work in theoretical and experimental science to develop sound solutions in both areas. Our work will be made publicly available through our AviaNZ software platform, which is already used by conservation groups across the country.

Total Awarded: $880,000

Duration: 3

Host: Massey University Manawatu

Contact Person: Professor SR Marsland

Panel: EIS

Project ID: 17-MAU-154


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2014

Title: Axioms and algorithms for multi-winner elections

Recipient(s): Professor AM Slinko | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr MC Wilson | AI | The University of Auckland
Dr Pritchard | AI | The University of Auckland
Dr P Faliszewski | AI | AGH Institute of Science and Technology

Public Summary: Multi-winner elections are even more ubiquitous than single-winner ones, but much less studied. One reason is that there is a variety of models coexisting within this concept. We aim to classify the important types of multi-winner elections and, for each type, formulate the desirable normative properties and investigate any incompatibilities between these axioms. It is a commonplace for single-winner elections that not all desirable properties are compatible; this became clear from the famous Arrow (1951) and Gibbard-Satterthwaite (1973-75) impossibility theorems and further (and stronger) impossibility theorem of Slinko and White (2008). So trade-offs are inevitable and this makes the work of electoral designers complicated. However in the multi-winner case we do not even know what the trade-offs are. The emerging trade-offs will be studied theoretically and experimentally using probabilistic modelling methods developed by us in recent simulations of the NZ electoral system. Some methods of fully proportional representation e.g., those suggested by Chamberlin-Courant (1983) and Monroe (1995) have many attractive features but are proven to be NP-complete to implement. We will look for approximation algorithms for these two rules which also have nice normative properties. Our research will contribute to the design of new and effective voting systems.

Total Awarded: $535,000

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Professor AM Slinko

Panel: MIS

Project ID: 14-UOA-254


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2008

Title: Back to the future: how the brain uses the past to imagine the future

Recipient(s): Dr DR Addis | PI | Harvard University
Prof MC Corballis | AI | The University of Auckland
Prof DL Schacter | AI | Harvard University

Public Summary: Research on memory has traditionally focused on past events, but recent work, including our own, examines how memory for past events enables us to imagine and plan the future. This work has revealed a core neural network that supports both remembering the past and simulating the future, but is more intensively engaged in future than past events. We plan to use neuroimaging (fMRI) to identify the mental processes that drive this increased activity during the simulation of future events. It will provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the brain draws upon details in our memories to simulate our futures.

Total Awarded: $590,222

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Dr DR Addis

Panel: EHB

Project ID: 08-UOA-176


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2010

Title: Bacterial breakdown in a high-CO2 ocean

Recipient(s): Dr CS Law | PI | NIWA - The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd
Dr E Maas | PI | NIWA - The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd

Public Summary: We hypothesise that increased bacterial exo-enzyme activity in a high CO2 ocean will decrease the carbon pump to the deep ocean. Acidification of the ocean is a result of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere that is now affecting the ecology of the ocean. However, the impact of high CO2 in the oceans on marine bacteria is not well understood or researched, even though marine bacteria play a fundamental role in cycling nutrients and transferring carbon to the deep ocean. We propose to investigate this using both CO2 manipulation incubations, and also natural areas of high CO2 in the Bay of Plenty. This combined approach is a powerful one that overcomes the limitation of short-term laboratory CO2 incubations, and will enable prediction and modelling of changes in bacterial activity in the future ocean.

Total Awarded: $756,522

Duration: 3

Host: National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

Contact Person: Dr CS Law

Panel: EEB

Project ID: 10-NIW-009


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2010

Title: Bacterial geo-thermometer: A new, precise indicator of climate change

Recipient(s): Dr MJ Vandergoes | PI | GNS Science
Dr AC Dieffenbacher-Krall | AI | University of Maine
Prof RM Newnham | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Prof L Schwark | AI | University of Kiel
Dr K Zink | AI | GNS Science

Public Summary: Accurate reconstructions of past temperature change from Southern Hemisphere locations are scarce and are needed urgently to provide a long term context to current climate change, test leading hypotheses about possible causal mechanisms, and to constrain models used to predict future climate. Recent progress has been made with new models for quantitative climate reconstruction using biological indicators including pollen and insect remains. A key question is whether these reconstructions can be validated and their precision improved by applying additional quantitative techniques. A recently developed method using microbial membrane lipids in lake sediments as a molecular paleothermometer has the potential to enable more precise paleotemperature reconstructions than have been previously achieved in New Zealand. The proposed research will establish and apply this technique to New Zealand paleoclimate sites that span the last glaciation. This innovative approach will increase the precision of New Zealand’s paleoclimate estimates and address issues relating to the timing, magnitude and variability of last glaciation climate change. The results will allow for better integration of terrestrial and marine reconstructions and more robust climate correlation between the northern and the southern hemispheres.

Total Awarded: $686,957

Duration: 3

Host: GNS Science

Contact Person: Dr MJ Vandergoes

Panel: ESA

Project ID: 10-GNS-001


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2009

Title: Bacterial protection against phage infections

Recipient(s): Dr PC Fineran | PI | University of Otago
Professor GPC Salmond | AI | University of Cambridge

Public Summary: Phage are viruses that infect bacteria. They are the most abundant biological entities on the planet and are involved in the lysis of bacteria at enormous rates, driving bacterial evolution and biogeochemical cycles. How bacteria evade phage is a key, under-examined field. We will test if there is a relationship between the abundant bacterial toxin-antitoxin (TA) and abortive infection (Abi) loci as 'cell suicide' modules adapted for viral evasion. Their mechanisms used to sense and abort phage replication and protect bacterial populations will be investigated, leading to a greater understanding of the most frequent predator-prey interaction.

Total Awarded: $669,333

Duration: 3

Host: University of Otago

Contact Person: Dr PC Fineran

Panel: CMP

Project ID: 09-UOO-177


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2013

Title: BAFfled: how does orf virus defeat the BAF cellular defence mechanism?

Recipient(s): Professor AA Mercer | PI | University of Otago
Professor P Traktman | AI | Medical College of Wisconsin

Public Summary: It was shown recently that a eukaryotic protein, BAF, is part of the cell’s innate defences against viral infection. Most poxviruses defeat this defence by using a viral kinase to phosphorylate BAF. However, we have identified some poxviruses that lack this kinase. How then do these viruses counteract BAF? We will identify the factor these viruses use to defeat BAF and characterise its mechanism of action. This project will define a new mechanism by which viruses evade cellular defences and shine new light on the activities of BAF, an essential cellular factor.

Total Awarded: $800,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Otago

Contact Person: Professor AA Mercer

Panel: CMP

Project ID: 13-UOO-233


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