Research Projects

New Media Services addresses the many facets of innovation for the media industry: new business models, new ways to produce and consume news as well as technological innovations that may prove disruptive for the media industry. The project also helps non-media companies with the creation of sustainable online communities and the collaborative curating of digital collections.

Objectives:

Explore innovative business models for new and existing online services.
Technology-driven innovation for journalism.
Methodologies for non-media companies to nurture online communities.

Outcomes:

A ongoing stream of demonstrators for new online services.
Demonstrator of new services for the news media
Methodologies and targeted advice for online communities
Create prototypes for tagging and editing rich multimedia content
Policy directions in copyright, access and privilege for online collections

Immersive Service Interfaces develops a massively scalable online immersive environment: thousands of users can collaborate in a virtual world using their real-world images captured by regular webcams and realistic rendering of voice. Ground-breaking advances in distributed communication protocols allow us to deliver superior scalability using existing computing and networking capabilities.

Objectives:

Sustain our technological leadership in the immersive delivery of services
Understand the social context for driving the creation of new immersive services
Improve productivity and effectiveness of education in immersive environments

Outcomes:

A research prototype of an immersive service delivery environment with hybrid peer-to-peer capability, test results, user evaluation data and documentation
Proof-of-concept demonstrator of an immersive Free Viewpoint Multimedia technology for bringing real-world artefacts into a virtual world in high definition
Ongoing watch for opportunities in serious uses of avatars and virtual worlds
Prototype for flexibly delivering teaching and training in immersive environments

The Personalisation project researches advanced data-mining techniques for tailoring online services to specific individuals through the identification of individual customer behaviour. This work is applied to high-visibility web properties from CRC industry partners in order to provide a superior user experience on differentiating service features that directly drive revenues.

Objectives:

Develop novel techniques for user profiling and market segmentation including dynamic segmentation, and use these for the construction of user profiles and new market segmentation models of customers and social networks of customers.
Develop recommendation and information filtering techniques for improving the relevance of content in services

Outcomes:

Industry-specific prototypes demonstrating the personalisation of services based on user profiles and market segmentation models.
Improved ability to segment the market and personalise products and services.
Improved ability to develop more relevant products and services for audiences and customers.

Multi-Channel Content Delivery and Mobile Personalisation researches techniques for customising the services delivered through a mobile or in-vehicle device.

Objectives:

Convey to all CRC participants an understanding of current and emerging network and platform environments and their impacts on service delivery capabilities
Develop and trial techniques and mechanisms for garnering and maintaining current user context information, including network, device and physical location
Understand requirements for re-purposing content to suit user identity and context, develop and trial network and platform independent techniques for automatic repurposing of content
Build and evolve demonstrators of customised service delivery and adaptive mobile platforms involving context-awareness

Outcomes:

A number of proof-of-concept demonstrators for innovative services on mobile devices for enabling a short feedback loop with industry participants.
Advances in semi-automatic content repurposing in order to greatly improve the reach and productivity of content delivery services on various devices.
Demonstrator of next-generation in-vehicle service delivery

Services 2020 uses foresight methods to develop an understanding of the challenges facing Australian service industries in collaboration with industry, government and academic participants. The project looks at paradigm shifts in technical, social, business, informational, organisational, demographic, and political aspects, and attempt to foresee likely, high impact changes.

Objectives:

Develop and maintain a conceptual framework for services in general
Anticipate disruptive change early enough for participants to act on opportunities and threats
Deliver focused foresighting to participants or service industries
Perform foresight on broadband-enabled services in the context of Broadband networks, both wireless and wired (NBN in particular).

Outcomes:

Re-usable foresighting methods tailored for our participants network
Specialised futures surveys for selected participants
Identify “blank” and emerging spaces for services innovation and business models to exploit them.
Report on opportunities in broadband-enabled services in the Australian context

Service Delivery Framework creates models and tools for increasing productivity at every stage of the online service delivery supply chain. Central to the project is USDL (Unified Service Description Language), a comprehensive model for representing all aspects of a service and the Service Broker, an online repository for service models. Such models are used, for example, for mapping the service ecosystem of participants and semi-automating the creation of user interfaces for services

Objectives:

Improve productivity of online service delivery by addressing all the elements of the service delivery chain, from service provision to repurposing and consumption, including connection with third-party service gateways
Extend and validate the Universal Service Description Language (USDL) specification
Explore individualisation of online service provisioning to tailor service delivery

Outcomes:

Global Service Delivery Framework architecture report and prototype
Reports on detailed use cases in banking, spatial and enterprise services
USDL specifications and adoption roadmap
Prototype and report on context-aware service delivery

Services Aggregation looks at technical barriers to the effective aggregation of services from different angles: lifecycle management, security and quality of service. The project also explores the opportunities and challenges of deploying service aggregations on Cloud Computing solutions and performs hands-on application-level service aggregation of location-based services.

Objectives:

Address the issue of building reliable, large-scale aggregations of online service
Understand how to best take advantage of Cloud Computing offerings

Outcomes:

Tools for predicting the impact a change in one service may have over an entire ecosystem of inter-related online services.
Design Patterns and business models for the reliable and secure use of existing Cloud Computing platforms for the provision of online services.

Business Services Management aims at establishing Business Service Management (BSM) as the business discipline dedicated to the holistic management of services in an organisation to ensure alignment with the needs of the customer and the objectives of the organisation. The project creates tools and associated methodologies for mapping, optimizing and evolving a portfolio of services.

Objectives:

Develop and establish Business Service Management as the business discipline dedicated to the holistic management of services in an organisation

Outcomes:

An integrated software tool for service portfolio management, prioritisation and alignment with business objectives.
A methodology for service quality measurement and management
A methodology for co-creation with service consumers
A methodology for designing and innovating business models for services
A series of highly-visible white papers to establish the Smart Services CRC as the undisputed thought leader in Business Services Management

New Financial Services researches, designs, builds and validates next-generation user-centred solutions for the Banking industry, drawing inspiration from existing users as well as new financial or technological capabilities. Beyond Internet Banking, the project allows users to strategically manage their finances through an online application that aggregates information from different sources.

Objectives:

Extend online financial services such as user-centric financial planning tools
Use semantics and data mining for cross-marketing between financial services
Find out key inhibitors and motivators for mobile financial services
“Serious gaming” for banks to improve young people’s financial literacy.
Find opportunities by studying banking with and within developing countries

Outcomes:

A prototype of extended user-centric financial planning tool
A prototype demonstrator for cross-marketing between services
Report on user studies for mobile financial services
A prototype demonstrator of serious gaming for financial literacy
Report on opportunities sourced from studying developing countries