Connecting BITA and RiskWi$e: Dr Steve Bickley and Tim Nguyen’s visit
We recently welcomed ARC Training Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption (BITA) researchers Dr Steve Bickley and Tim Nguyen to UWA for four days of knowledge sharing, new connections and collaborative research.
From 11–14 August 2026, ARC BITA Research Fellow, Dr Steve Bickley, and Research Assistant, Tim Nguyen, met with colleagues across the UWA School of Agriculture and Environment (SAGE).
Hosted by Dr German Puga, their visit provided valuable time to discuss emerging findings from existing collaborative research, and to strengthen connections between the BITA and CAVE research communities.
The visit included meetings and informal discussions with our CAVE colleagues involved in BITA, as well as a morning tea and a research seminar delivered by Tim for the broader Agricultural and Resource Economics department in SAGE.
Steve and Tim also joined BITA research students Yadav, Mithun and Mahnaz for dinner, providing an opportunity to share research experiences and build connections beyond their day-to-day projects.
Communicating agricultural risk
A key focus of their visit was progressing collaborative research with CAVE researchers, Professor Marit Kragt and Dr German Puga, on how risk and uncertainty are communicated through Australian agricultural extension materials. This research is co-funded by GRDC’s Riskwi$e program and ARC’s BITA program.
The team has compiled a large national collection of agricultural outreach and extension materials published between 2013 and 2025, with a particular focus on 2019 onwards. The collection includes resources from research and grower organisations, including GRDC Research Updates, Online Farm Trials, NVT harvest reports, conference papers, GrowNotes and grower group resources.
Using LLMs, the team has transformed this large collection of documents into a structured dataset that can be analysed by the behavioural economists to identify patterns and insights. The LLMs use predefined questions and categories to consistently identify and record relevant information, including information presented in figures, tables and maps. The extracted data is then checked and converted into a research-ready dataset for analysis.
During the visit, Steve and Tim worked with German and Marit to discuss the large dataset and emerging insights into how risk is communicated in agricultural extension materials. The key learnings will be summarised for our RiskWi$e stakeholders later this year in a factsheet.
Research Seminar: from unstructured text to knowledge graphs
Tim also shared his expertise in AI and research automation through a seminar, From Unstructured Text to Knowledge Graphs: Agentic Semantic Automation Workflows for Research.
The seminar attracted close to 30 attendees, with strong interest from students and early- and mid-career researchers.
Tim’s research applies large language models, AI agents and knowledge graphs to transform unstructured research documents into structured and searchable datasets. His presentation explored how these tools can extract and organise information from narrative documents using predefined schemas, specialised agents and validation processes.
He demonstrated the approach through his work on a historical research project involving Spanish Inquisition records, and discussed how similar methods could support document-based research in agricultural and environmental economics.
The seminar generated considerable interest and gave researchers an opportunity to consider how emerging AI approaches could be applied to their own research.
Strengthening research connections
Steve and Tim’s visit provided much more than an opportunity to meet in person. It created dedicated time to progress collaborative research, discuss ideas, share new research methods and build relationships across institutions and disciplines. CAVE looks forward to continuing these collaborations and seeing where the research leads.
More information
German Puga: german.puga@uwa.edu.au
Steve Bickley: s.bickley@qut.edu.au
Tim Nguyen: letu.nguyen@qut.edu.au
ARC Training Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption (BITA)
Website: ARC BITA
RiskWi$e Program
CAVE Website: Behavioural Science Toolkit
Project Website: https://research.csiro.au/riskwise/
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