Category: Awards

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.

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:

Dashboard url

Video demonstration

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.

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!

Congratulations to our Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Javad Pool who received the prestigious ACPHIS PhD Medal last week. It is awarded annually for the best Australian PhD thesis in the discipline of Information Systems. Find out more about Javad’s award winning thesis.

Congratulations to our CIRES Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Javad Pool who has received a 2023 Award for Excellence from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law (BEL) at The University of Queensland.

The award was for Research – Engagement and Impact, within the Trust in AI Research Team working with Professor Nicole Gillespie, Dr Caitlin Curtis, and Dr Steven Lockey.

“I’m honoured to receive this BEL Award for Excellence 2023 alongside the Trust in AI Research Team. Professor Nicole Gillespie’s leadership in this research has been inspiring, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Nicole, Steve, and Caitlin on impactful projects highlighted in the media, in policy, and in industry reports.”

Congratulations Javad!

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