Thank you Professor Sadiq for your leadership and vision in shaping the future of data, AI and responsible technology in Australia and globally.
CIRES is proud to support the new Resilient Data Engineering Award, launching in 2026 as part of the prestigious Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) Awards.
This award recognises early career data researchers, professionals and teams who are building the resilient data pipelines that underpin critical national systems and decision making.
CIRES Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE led this initiative in partnership with ATSE, and with fantastic support for the award from heads of computing across Australia.
Information resilience is the ability to build and maintain agile data pipelines that can detect and respond to failures and risks across the entire data lifecycle. Promoting information (or data) resilience among engineers, scientists, and researchers is essential to developing a workforce that can drive a data savvy society, fuel Australia’s future economy, and uphold responsible data management practices.
“This award recognises and celebrates the back-end work done by data scientists and data engineers, work that brings credibility, efficiency, and impact to so many discoveries. It is an exciting opportunity to celebrate the future leaders designing the robust, trustworthy data systems that Australia increasingly relies on,” Professor Sadiq said.
A huge thank you to all the contributing partners:
Congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Rocky Chen on his promotion to Associate Professor at The University of Queensland!
Additionally, Rocky’s project, Multimodal Hate Speech Detection through Explainable AI with Collaborative Agents has been successful in the Queensland-Bavaria Collaborative Research Program Seed Grant scheme.
On 19 August 2025 CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq, was part of a UQ delegation to attend the 2025 Australian Financial Review Higher Education Awards in Sydney to celebrate the outstanding achievements of the higher education sector as well as support the three UQ finalists who were nominated for awards.
A huge congratulations to our CIRES PhD Researcher, Daisy Xu, who is the 2025 DeSanctis Award Winner presented by the Communication, Digital Technology, and Organization (CTO) division of the Academy of Management. This award recognizes outstanding scholarship in the area of communication and digital technology, specifically for a solo-authored conference paper based on a recent dissertation.
A huge congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Dr Rocky Chen who has been awarded the prestigious Lord Mayor’s Convention Trailblazer Grant. Congratulations Rocky!!
This important program led by the Brisbane Economic Development Agency (BEDA) is designed to support emerging leaders and help them bring international conferences to Brisbane. Dr Chen, a Senior Lecturer, data science researcher and ARC DECRA Fellow, will use the grant to attend a top-tier global computer science conference, such as the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining in Washington DC.
“This grant will allow me to advocate for my work on responsible data science to an international audience,” Dr Chen said. “It also gives me the opportunity to promote Brisbane as a future host city for one of the world’s most respected data mining conferences.”
Dr Chen’s research focuses on building trustworthy and scalable data mining systems – uncovering patterns in large datasets to support responsible decision-making across a range of sectors. He is also a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES), where he leads research on secure and ethical data practices in collaboration with industry and government.
“I’m incredibly honoured and excited to receive this recognition,” he said. “I look forward to working with BEDA to help bring a global event to Brisbane and further strengthen our city’s reputation as a centre for technological innovation.”
The Trailblazer Grant not only supports travel to international events but also empowers recipients to grow their leadership skills, build global networks, and attract investment and talent to Brisbane’s research ecosystem.
“I highly recommend the Trailblazer Grant to other early career researchers,” Dr Chen said. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to accelerate your career and broaden your impact. All you need is passion!”
Find out more about the Lord Mayor’s Convention Trailblazer Grant.
It’s been a big week for the CIRES Team from The University of Queensland at The Web Conference in Sydney!
CIRES PhD Researcher Elyas Meguellati gave two presentations, including a workshop paper titled “Are Large Language Models Good Data Preprocessors?” on investigating whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be good for cleaning text, and when to strategically alternate between LLMs and rule-based methods. The second day he presented his PhD topic, journey, and progress as part of the PhD Symposium. Elyas had the opportunity to be mentored by world renowned scholar in machine learning, Professor Irwin King from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“I received valuable input and questions from the scholars and audience to consider for my research. It was a great opportunity to make new friends and connections with similar interests from all over the globe,” said Elyas.
Our PhD Researcher Hongliang Ni also attended and presented her work on operationalising harmlessness in online AI systems.
“It was a fantastic experience attending the WWW-25 PhD Symposium. I was inspired by the breadth of research presented, especially through the keynotes and paper sessions. One key takeaway for me was recognising both the potential and the vulnerability of multi-agent frameworks. Moving forward, I believe it’s crucial to focus on building systems that are not only effective but also robust. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn, reflect, and connect with such a vibrant research community.”
CIRES Alum Dr Junliang Yu presented the Demo paper “BiasNavi: LLM-Empowered Data Bias Management.” BiasNavi is an LLM-powered toolkit developed by the Centre and designed to make bias management in data more accessible. It guides users through a structured, intelligent workflow – from bias detection to mitigation – leveraging the power of LLMs to streamline and simplify complex processes.
Congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator Prof. Gianluca Demartini and PhD researchers Stefano Civelli & Pietro Bernardelle who won the best paper award at the Workshop on Multimodal Content Analysis for Social Good for their work “The Impact of Persona-based Political Perspectives on Hateful Content Detection“. Great work team!
Thank you to the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery and www25 organisers for an excellent conference.
Congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Gianluca Demartini on his promotion to Professor at The University of Queensland!
Gianluca says: “I’m happy to share that I have been promoted to Professor at The University of Queensland. I have worked at UQ for 7 years (it’s the place I’ve worked the longest in my career!) and have been promoted twice since I joined. Thanks to all my PhD students and postdocs that over the years made this possible. Thanks also to all my mentors within UQ and beyond for all their amazing advice and support! Looking forward to the next challenge!”
Congratulations to our CIRES Chief Investigator Ida Asadi Someh on her promotion to Associate Professor at The University of Queensland!
Ida says: “I’m happy to share that I have been promoted to Associate Professor at The University of Queensland! While I’ve been fortunate to have a fantastic network supporting and cheering me on, I want to give a special shout-out to three extraordinary women who have been instrumental in this stage of my career: Barb Wixom, Marta Indulska, and Shazia Sadiq. Your guidance, mentorship, and friendship have been invaluable. You’ve helped me become a better researcher, a stronger leader, and a more well-rounded person and mother. Thank you for championing my growth and helping me navigate the complexities of this demanding career path. I am truly indebted to you!”
We are pleased to announce the winners of our inaugural CIRES Best Demo Award!
Congratulations to PhD Researchers Elyas Meguellati and Stefano Civelli from The University of Queensland who received a $1,000 AUD prize for their demo, the Ad Persuasion Dashboard – Insights into Facebook Political Campaign Strategies.
The demo presents an interactive dashboard to analyse persuasive content in political advertising on social media. Focusing on Facebook ads from the 2022 Australian Federal Election campaign, it uses a state-of-the-art lightweight model for persuasive text detection. The web application allows users to gain insights through visualisations of comparative spend and impressions on high vs. low persuasion ads, time series analysis of ad impressions, and demographic targeting patterns. The tool enhances transparency in digital pollical campaigning by enabling researchers and the public to explore persuasion strategies employed in social media advertising.
This work has been submitted to the ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2025. Future applications and work identified include more analyses to be shown and the ability for other researchers to upload their dataset.
Elyas’s PhD project, titled ‘The Duality of Persuasion,’ delves into both the generation and detection aspects of persuasive communication. On the generation side, his research focuses on creating tailored messages that align with specific personality traits, while the detection side emphasizes identifying persuasive techniques in textual content. He is supervised by Profs. Gianluca Demartini and Shazia Sadiq.
Stefano’s PhD research is focused on developing novel methodologies for measuring and understanding prompt complexity in Large Language Models (LLMs). His work aims to identify and quantify the key factors that contribute to prompt complexity, with practical applications ranging from optimal model selection to response quality prediction. Working under the supervision of Prof. Gianluca Demartini, his research aims to advance our understanding of how to more effectively interact with and deploy LLMs in real-world applications
Find out more:
Pictured L to R: Elyas Meguellati, Prof. Shazia Sadiq, Dr Junliang Yu, & Stefano Civelli at CIRES HQ.
Congratulations to our Chief Investigator and UQ School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science lecturer Dr Rocky Chen who received the 2024 Early Career Research Leadership Award from the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology.
The award recognises Rocky’s significant contributions in “actively shaping the research community by delivering tutorials at prestigious conferences like WWW and DASFAA, promoting AI’s trustworthiness, security, and resource-efficiency in online services. His commitment to training ECRs is evident through organising the Australia wide Information Resilience PhD Schools, has benefited hundreds of scholars across Australia.”
Congratulations Rocky!!
Congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator, Professor Hongzhi Yin who was awarded the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology [EAIT] 2024 Higher Degree Research Supervision Excellence Award recognizing his outstanding contribution to individual supervision and to enhancing the research supervision culture.
Testimonial: “Now, as a senior lecturer myself, I apply many of the HDR training strategies I learned from Hongzhi in supervising my own PhD students… Hongzhi also taught me how to nurture the research capabilities of HDR students by guiding them in setting appropriate research plans and topics to maximize their potential.”
Congratulations to our CIRES Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE who received a 2024 UQ Award for Excellence in Leadership! The annual awards presented by The University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Deborah Terry, celebrate the exceptional achievements of staff who exemplify the UQ values and acknowledge their incredible contributions across the university.
“Professor Shazia Sadiq has demonstrated performance and leadership throughout her career. She is an extraordinary and visionary leader, with a natural ability to bring people together across faculties and deliver sustained and positive change within the University and beyond. Her vision and leadership, together with her belief in the power of multidisciplinary approaches, are behind several significant and successful initiatives at UQ. These include the Master of Data Science program, the Australian Research Council’s Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES), and the UQ AI Collaboratory. These initiatives have positioned UQ as a leader in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence education and research.”
On behalf of the CIRES Team, thank you Shazia for your leadership, vision, and dedication to everything you do! Our warm congratulations to all of this year’s award winnerss.
Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE attended the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering New Fellows Showcase and Award Gala Dinner, meeting with Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley, and The Hon Ed Husic MP, Minister for Industry and Science. We extend our warm congratulations to Professor Lyn Beazley AO FTSE FAA as this year’s President’s Medal recipient, to the award recipients, and to all the 32 new Fellows including our colleagues from The University of Queensland Professor Lianzhou Wang FTSE FAA, Professor Xiwang Zhang FTSE, and Anne-Marie Birkill FTSE.
Congratulations to CIRES CI, Professor Gianluca Demartini, who has secured a UQ TUM Workshop Grant to support travel costs for CIRES staff and CIRES PhD Researcher, Elyas Meguellati, to attend a collaborative research workshop at the Technical University of Munich [TUM] workshop, Munich, Germany from 2-4 July 2025.
CIRES Chief Investigator Hassan Khosravi and the RiPPLE team have been named a finalist for the Queensland AI Research Project of the Year at the Queensland AI Awards 2024 for their project RiPPLE: Harnessing student wisdom to improve learning.
A huge thank you to The University of Queensland, UQ Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI) & UniQuest for their unwavering support, and to Queensland AI Hub for this incredible recognition.
RiPPLE represents a pioneering approach in the education sector where we believe that every student has the potential to create impactful waves in the ocean of knowledge. Instead of being passive recipients of content, we want to empower students to spread their wisdom, contribute to knowledge creation and transform their learning into an active social and personalized learning experience. It uniquely integrates the principles of co-creation with advanced AI technologies to enable educators to partner with students to develop a peer-reviewed repository of study resources. These resources are then used to engage individual students with personalized instruction tailored to their specific learning needs.
For more details on the platform, check out this video. We’re excited to start supporting pilot trials of RiPPLE in both schools and higher education.
Congratulations to CIRES Chief Investigator & Theme Leader, Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini who has been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship! The ARC announced $106.7 million in funding this week for 100 new projects under the ARC’s 2024 Future Fellowships scheme.
Gianluca’s project “A Principled Approach to Data Bias Management in Data Pipelines” aims to tackle the fundamental problems of bias in data and AI, and proposes the new concept of bias management. Being trained with massive amounts of human generated content, AI may reflect and reinforce human bias and stereotypes and may be used for malicious purposes. Urgent action is needed to support the average person in better understanding if the output of AI systems can be trusted or not. The aim is to empower end-users to make informed data-driven decisions and benefit Australia by accelerating investment in responsible AI and fostering greater social acceptance in AI.
“It is exciting to have the opportunity to work on this important research topic for the next four years. I would like to thank all the people involved in the work that resulted in this fellowship.”
Congratulations Gianluca!
A team of four EECS undergraduate students from BCompSci and BEng(Hons) won first prize in the International AI Hackathon. The hackathon was held in Bangkok from July 24 to 27. They created a flood prediction application that was 75% more accurate than Google’s flood forecasting, based on the historical data that they used. Representatives of the Thai government expressed interest in supporting the team to continue their work on the project.
The team received funding support from CIRES to travel to Bangkok to participate in the hackathon and CIRES also provided the team with pre-trip training on information resilience.
At the hackathon, Aneesha Bakharia from EECS provided a full-day training workshop on developing software that uses LLMs delivered to all hackathon participants. The hackathon was jointly organised by EECS, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, and the Thai National Innovation Agency. It was supported by AWS, AMD, and Digital Focus.
Congratulations to First Prize Winners: Pritika Guglani, Abdallah Azazy, Bailey Stoodley, and Sidney Neil
A team led by CIRES CI, Prof Hongzhi Yin, has been selected as a finalist by the iAward judging panel for their entry “Personalized On-Device Large Language Models” in the category of Technology Platforms. Hongzhi and PhD student, Liang Qu have been invited to the Queensland State iAwards Ceremony , a celebration of innovations in the tech sector, to determine the winners of the nominated categories. Here is a great video where you can learn about the project (spoiler: you can use large language models on your phone offline!)
Congratulations to CIRES Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Junliang Yu who has received a 2023 Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Thesis Award for his PhD thesis “Enhancing Recommender Systems with Self-Supervised Learning”. Junliang was commended by independent examiners for making a substantial contribution to this field of research. Fewer than ten percent of PhD or MPhil graduates from UQ receive this award. Well done Junliang!
Our Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq FSTE is this week’s FellowFriday! Thank you ATSE for profiling Shazia and her amazing work and leadership in data science, AI and responsible data management.
A Professor at The University of Queensland, Professor Sadiq’s research focuses on helping organisations build and protect agile, ethical and resilient data systems for advanced analytics and AI. Her work also addresses the socio-technical barriers that shape successful data-driven transformation. She is Director of the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) and has been a passionate advocate for ethical educational technology for over two decades.