 Hello. My name is Titus Tang. I'm a training manager on the Monash University Data Science and AI platform. I'm here to talk about a collaboration in skills training and workshop organization between Monash University, the University of Queensland and the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation. I'm here representing a large group of people working on this project. My counterparts are Dr Nick Hamilton from the University of Queensland and Mark Crow from QCIF. This project that we are working on is funded by the ARDC platform project called Environments to Accelerate Machine Learning-Based Discovery. As the name indicates, the purpose of this project is to create the right kinds of environments for hardware, software and people in order to facilitate the adoption and acceleration, accelerate the adoption of machine learning in research. What I'm going to talk about today focuses on a subset of this project that looks at skills training and workshop organization. So one of the first questions we asked ourselves that we embarked on this project was how do we upskill people in machine learning, upskill our researchers, staff and students in machine learning, not just in our home organization but across partner institutions and across Australia in general. One of the observations that we made was that each institution typically had a set of workshop content that they have created and are running on a regular basis in their own institution. To our surprise, there was a very little overlap in the content developed by one institution relative to that developed by some other institution. And so that was good because everyone had a piece of the puzzle that we could place together to form a more, to form a better bigger picture. So one of the first things we did was to embark on a workshop sharing arrangement. This sharing arrangement is pretty simple. Monash makes our workshops available for attendees at UQ Inclusive. UQ Inclusive does the same for Monash staff and students. So this provides a variety of immediate and clear benefits. Firstly, it allows attendees from both partner institutions to a wider selection, a wider range of workshop content and expertise that they have access to. From a trainer's perspective, this allows us to increase our range of offerings without having to repeat the development of specific workshops in each institution. This arrangement also facilitates the sharing of knowledge between institutions because each organisation has a specific skill set that we have strengths in specific areas of research. And by sharing not only the workshop content but the availability of lead instructors and senior researchers across institutions, this allows our staff and students to have access to the skill sets and expertise that they would otherwise not have access to without the arrangement. From a trainer's perspective, it allows our lead trainers and our teaching staff to upskill themselves on areas of interest that allows them to then contribute back to the teaching and research community. So each of the workshops we run typically has between 20 to 40 attendees depending on the workshop. And our arrangement is pretty simple. We open up five seats per workshop event to our partner institutions. So the table on the right here shows a list of training events that we have held or will hold through the second half of 2020, roughly between 15 to 20 events so far. And we definitely intend to repeat this and scale this up in 2021. One of the main things that we have discovered is that there is a very high demand for these workshops across institutions. Each time we advertise the five seats that we have, we will easily receive a waiting list or a sign up list of about 50 people. And so that speaks to the high demand for a variety of workshops that we don't have yet in each of our institutions. Now the biggest problem if we have, so this naturally leads to our hope of being able to run these workshops, run first of all, run a larger variety of workshops and secondly to run these workshops on a more regular basis. And the biggest problem we are facing in order to do that is definitely people. Firstly, the number of people we need who have the right skills to be able to help run and teach in these workshops and also the right kind of experts that are able and have the right skill sets to be able to teach in each of these research domains. So this is not the end of the project. We definitely intend to expand this collaborative arrangement further into 2021. One of the lowest-hanging foods is to share the workshop content between institutions and to embark on some sort of a teacher exchange program in which teaching assistants from one institution could join the main instructor from the host institution to run some workshops. And this gives teaching assistants the opportunity to obscure themselves in those specific areas of knowledge and it also provides each institution a larger variety, a larger range of, larger selection of people who are able to help out in these workshops. Naturally, an extension to that would be to organize, train the trainer events in which we upscale lead instructors in each institution to be able to independently run a workshop developed by the partner institution. And this naturally increases our choices in what we can, what workshops we can run without having to depend on the resources of other parties. Like I mentioned before, the biggest problem we have is having the right number of people and the right people with the right skill sets. And so one of the biggest problems we need to solve over the next few months would be to formalize a trainer upskilling program in order to train trainers and teaching assistants on a more regular basis and at a larger scale in order to be able to hold these workshops more regularly. So that leads to one of our big goals, that is to meet the demand that we have with regards to upskilling and the running of these workshops. So we want to be able to run a larger variety of workshops, we want to be able to run them more often, and we want to be able to offer more seats per event to our partner institutions. Now, while at the moment this is only a collaboration between Monash, UQ and QSIF, we definitely intend to open and promote our collaborative arrangement to the wider research community. I don't see this as a zero sum game, I think this has a snowball effect, in the sense that the more people get on board, the more organizations that get on board on this collaborative workshop sharing arrangement, the better economics of skill that we are able to achieve, which ultimately benefits all of us. That's it from me today, thank you for your time.