Collaboration in Focus

SAARC hosts National Symposium

The School of Accounting and Finance and the Social Accounting and Accountability Research Centre (SAARC) hosted the 2nd National Forensic Accounting Teaching and Research Symposium on 12-14th February 2012. Forensic accounting is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary specialisation and the symposium explored the interface between accounting practice, research and education.

To foster these aims, the highlight on the first day was a panel discussion with judges, lawyers and forensic accountants. The topic of discussion was the presentation of evidence in civil and criminal cases. Monday’s symposium presented a range of topics from the keynote speakers, Ron Durkin a former FBI investigator, Dr Peter Hughes, Head of Internal Audit, Orange County, California and Craig Edwards from the accounting firm Lonergan Edwards and Associates. The day also included papers from practitioners, researchers and academics from law and accounting.

The final session on Tuesday was devoted to exploring potential research areas between practitioners and researchers from the School of Accounting and Finance. The symposium was well received by the participants from a range of both public and private organisations including the national and state law enforcement agencies, government departments, other universities from both Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

The next symposium will be hosted by Queensland University of Technology in 2014.

UOW and five councils join in new consortium

A new consortium which represents an innovative model for research collaboration and engagement between local government authorities and UOW will be officially launched tomorrow (Friday 28 October).
Five keystone councils are committed and actively involved in the consortium for at least a three-year initial period – Wollongong City, Shoalhaven City, Hurstville City, Rockdale City and Camden councils.
 

The Director of the Local Government Research and Practice Development Consortium, Associate Professor Andrew Sense from UOW’s School of Management and Marketing, said essentially the consortium created the supported opportunity for nominated council staff to engage in doing a Masters by Research or a PhD through UOW on projects that are of strategic importance to a council or to the local government sector more broadly.
 

The other focal point of the consortium will involve UOW acting as the hub for networking, research guidance and knowledge exchanges between the five councils, their researchers and the University.
“This will be achieved, for example, through quarterly showcase forums where candidates will make presentations on their projects and UOW staff in various research centres will have opportunities to showcase their research to an invited audience of senior council staff,” Professor Sense said.
 

Twelve new research projects across Management (9), Marketing (2) and Engineering (1) disciplines are now under way with an additional five to eight new consortium research projects expected to begin each year thereafter.
Professor Sense said that all the projects have been endorsed by the respective councils as being of significance and the higher degree research council candidates are generally senior level council staff. A sample of the multidisciplinary diversity in these projects includes:
 

• Should cadetships/traineeships be a key strategic organisational development activity to help address professional skills shortages in local government?
• Engaging the community leaders of the future: constructing meaningful consultation with young people
• The behavioural impacts of creating businesses within a council business
• Infrastructure priorities for supporting community growth in new release areas: a systems thinking approach
   

Professor Sense said that the consortium addresses many of the University goals concerning community and professional engagement, the recruitment of high-quality research students, and will also underpin many new scholarly publications as the higher degree research students progress through their projects.  He said it would also create opportunities for UOW to jointly develop external grant applications with the five councils involved as well as initiate other research opportunities.
 

The consortium has attracted the support of external professional organisations such as the Local Government and Shires Association (LGSA).  Time and date of consortium launch: Friday 28 October at midday. Venue: Function Room 2, UniCentre, UOW. For further information contact Associate Professor Andrew Sense on (02) 4221 4723

MageCommunity health investigation

George Mickhail from the School of Accounting & Finance is leading a megaCommunity research project in Spatial Autonomic Health Accounting Applications (SAHAA) at the Centre region in France.  

SAHAA evolved out of an earlier multilingual e-Health prototype, that he developed and explored its implementation at a major Sydney Hospice in 2008, so as to facilitate and enhance the often misunderstood and undocumented interactions between healthcare professionals and patients, due to (a) language and cultural background barriers, and (b) time-poor healthcare professionals who are focused on formal diagnostic protocols while not paying proper attention to patients descriptions of their own symptoms, which place patients at risk of incorrect diagnosis and/or treatment.  

The SAHAA system serves three main purposes: 

(a) assist in the verbal and non-verbal multilingual and intercultural interaction between health professionals and patients, 

(b) assist with medical diagnostics using heuristics and spatial data-mining support, and 

(c) the autonomous optimisation of healthcare diagnostic and operational procedures within the dynamically changing operational benchmarks and financial constraints.  

The system will be piloted at the Centre region hospital, with its emergency services, inpatient and outpatient departments.  Touch screen terminals will go up in city centres and around key tourist sites, to enable emergency and Health enquiries.  The system will be available on the iPhone and iPad platform to enable residents, visitors and medical practitioners of the region to tap into the region’s emergency and e-Health services.