Category: Centre News

How can leaders move AI beyond isolated projects and embed it across the organisation?

Explore how to take this next step at UQ Business School’s AI-First Strategy Masterclass on Friday 6 November, led by globally recognised digital innovation expert Professor Youngjin Yoo, FBA from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Drawing on Professor Yoo’s work on the Runtime Economy, you’ll learn how continuous sensing, learning and action can reshape organisational strategy, operating models and governance.

Professor Yoo will be joined by data strategy expert and CIRES visiting expert, Professor Christine Legner from HEC Lausanne – The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, alongside CIRES Chief Investigator, Dr Ida Asadi Someh and Dr Frederik von Briel.

Youngjin’s work on the Runtime Economy challenges the assumptions the modern economy is built on. For centuries, value has rested on scarcity. Value falls as supply rises, systems are designed to produce the same result every time, and organisations exist to reduce the cost and complexity of exchange. Generative AI overturns each of these. It creates value through abundance, context and variation, producing unique, situation-specific outputs at runtime rather than replicating a fixed design. In this world, more supply can create more value, not less, and firms exist to create and capture value from abundance.

Christine brings the foundation every AI ambition depends on: data that is actually ready for AI. Without AI-ready data, agentic AI cant work at enterprise scale. Drawing on more than 100 sources and close collaboration with the 20 global partner companies of the Competence Center Corporate Data Quality, including BASF, Bosch, Nestlé, SAP and Siemens, her team has developed a practical definition of AI-ready data and six dimensions for assessing it.

Through real-world cases, this half-day masterclass will help you develop an AI-first strategy, scale AI responsibly and translate emerging technology into lasting value.

Learn more and register

It is our pleasure to welcome Professor Christine Legner from HEC Lausanne – The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne to CIRES at The University of Queensland.

Over the next month, Christine will be collaborating with CIRES researchers A.Prof. Ida Asadi Someh, Prof. Marta Indulska, Prof. Shazia Sadiq, and Lufan Zhang, sharing her expertise in information systems, data management, and digital transformation while engaging with our research community.

We are also delighted that she will be joining the 11th Information Systems Foundations Workshop hosted at UQ on 2-3 November 2026.

“I am very excited to progress the global data repurposing study we have started together with the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) and the Competence Center Corporate Data Quality (CC CDQ),” said CIRES Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq.

We look forward to the conversations, collaborations, and knowledge exchange her visit will bring.

Welcome Christine!

We are excited to profile our CIRES graduate, Dr Hechuan Wen, who celebrated his PhD graduation last week at The University of Queensland’s graduation ceremony in Shanghai.

How can organisations make informed decisions when the data available are limited, changing, or incomplete?

This question became the focus of CIRES PhD graduate Dr Hechuan Wen’s thesis, Advancing Causal Effect Estimation: From Training Data Expansion to Estimator Design, supervised by Associate Professor Rocky Chen, Professor Hongzhi Yin, Dr Li Kheng Chai, and Professor Shazia Sadiq.

Rather than simply predicting what is likely to happen, Hechuan studied how AI can estimate what would happen to an individual or community under a particular intervention, such as a healthcare policy, treatment, or public service. His research focused on making causal effect estimation more reliable and practical when real-world data are imperfect. Specifically, he addressed three key challenges: identifying the most informative data when labelling resources are limited; maintaining reliable estimates when data distributions change or important variables become unavailable; and quantifying uncertainty when causal effects are estimated from complex, interconnected data.

Reflecting on the importance of building connections throughout his PhD journey, Hechuan offers the following advice to current and future research students:

“My advice would be to stay focused on a meaningful research problem but remain open to where the PhD journey may take you. Research rarely progresses exactly as planned, and some of the most important learning happens when methods fail, data are imperfect, or questions need to evolve. I would also encourage students to look beyond publications and technical performance. Working with partner organisations, domain experts, and researchers from different backgrounds can broaden your perspective, strengthen the relevance of your research, and open opportunities that extend well beyond the PhD.”

Pictured above: Dr Hechuan Wen, UQ Graduation Day in Shanghai, October 2026. 

Read Hechuan’s Full Story

Institute for Digital Innovation (IDI) PhD candidate Nils Riekers recently travelled to The University of Queensland for a research stay at the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES), working with CIRES CI Associate Professor Rocky Chen and his research group.

Earlier this year, IDI hosted Rocky at Hochschule Neu-Ulm for a talk on combating social media misinformation. Now Nils made the trip to Brisbane for a short research stay, continuing the collaboration on multimodal multi-agent systems for hate speech detection.

The visit, funded by a seed grant from the Bavaria-Queensland Research Alliance (PI at HNU: Dr. Adeline Frenzel-Piasentin), enabled an intensive exchange on the joint project. Having both sides visit each other in person made a real difference: it allowed for focused, hands-on collaboration that is hard to replicate remotely and has given the project strong momentum going forward. We’re looking forward to the next stages of this collaboration. The stay concluded with a final presentation to Rocky’s group.

Many thanks to Rocky and his team for the warm welcome and to everyone who made this mutual exchange possible!

Australia doesn’t just need to adopt AI — it needs to build the capability to shape it.

In the latest article from CEDA – Committee for Economic Development of Australia, CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq, looks at how Australia can turn its research strengths and specialist expertise into practical AI capability.

From more energy-efficient computing to applications across health, science and industry, the opportunity is not simply to use AI better, but to build more of the capability here.

“It is a privilege to work alongside amazing AI researchers at The University of Queensland. Australia is among the world leaders in AI research publications and PhD outcomes. Our research sector is ready to take on AI challenges and work with industry and government to build the much needed capability.”

Read the full article here.

Wonderful to see CIRES PhD graduate Dr Daisy Xu embarking on this exciting new chapter with the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School. We’re proud to have been part of Daisy’s research journey at The University of Queensland and look forward to seeing her continued impact in the field.

Welcoming Daisy to DIGI!

What makes data valuable to an organisation?

It sounds like a straightforward question. In practice, the answer changes as data move between people, technologies, teams, and organisational contexts.

This is the territory at the heart of Daisy Xu’s research, and we are very pleased to welcome her as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor here at DIGI.

Daisy studies how organisations create value from data, with a particular interest in what happens when data are reused for purposes beyond those for which they were originally collected. Rather than treating data as a static organisational resource, her research examines how their meaning and value are continually shaped through interactions between people, technologies, and organisational practices.

Her PhD research at The University of Queensland explored these questions through close engagement with industry. Her dissertation, Three essays on data (re)use and value creation in organizations, examined how organisations can keep data meaningful, adaptable, and useful as they travel across teams and contexts.

One of those studies, Organizational Data Reuse: A Sociomaterial Perspective, received the DeSanctis Award at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2025 and was nominated for the academy-wide William H. Newman Award.

Daisy also brings considerable experience from outside academia. Before her PhD, she led data analytics projects at global consulting firms and later developed people analytics and strategic workforce planning products through her own consultancy.

That combination of research and practice is particularly relevant at DIGI. Questions about the value of data are rarely purely technical. They are also questions about how organisations work, how people interpret information, and how digital resources acquire new purposes over time.

At DIGI, Daisy strengthens our research on data and digitalisation with a perspective that connects these organisational questions with the practical realities of analytics.

We are very happy to have you with us, Daisy. Welcome to the department.

We are excited to profile our first CIRES graduate, Dr Daisy Xu, who celebrated her PhD graduation yesterday at The University of Queensland!

Daisy’s PhD journey with CIRES and the UQ Business School explored a powerful question: what makes data truly valuable once it has been collected? Through her thesis, Three essays on data (re)use and value creation in organizations, and an industry placement with Mantel, she examined how organisations can make data reusable across teams, functions, and changing business contexts.

“My industry placement made the idea of impact much more tangible. It reinforced that research creates value when it addresses practical challenges and produces insights that can be embedded into the everyday ways organisations govern, reuse, and trust their data,” said Daisy.

“Daisy is a very dedicated and proactive researcher. She successfully engaged with a wide range of my colleagues to gather the necessary support for her research, demonstrating a strong ability to navigate and work within an industry environment,” said Emma Freya, Principal Consultant at Mantel.

As Daisy prepares for an exciting new chapter as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School, she shares her advice for current and future PhD students.

“Share and present your research early and often – the conversations you have along the way are where you really grow as a researcher, and where ideas are tested, refined, and strengthened. Equally important is staying connected with your peers, mentors, and research community, whose support and perspectives will keep you motivated and resilient throughout the PhD journey.”

Pictured above: Dr Daisy Xu on graduation day at The University of Queensland, July 2026.

Read Daisy’s Full Story

The 5th UQ-wide AI HDR Showcase was successfully hosted by the AI Research Network, Alina Bialkowski, CIRES CI Rocky Chen, CIRES Centre Director, Shazia Sadiq & Shane Culpepper on 10-11 June, with 34 student presentations and over 100 attendees. The two-day event brought together students and researchers from diverse fields across the university from business, education, arts, agriculture, medicine, computer science, and engineering, to explore the transformative role of AI. The core theme throughout the showcase was shifting focus from merely using AI, to developing essential human skills; with speakers emphasising that while AI excels at generating answers, humans must possess superior critical thinking, and the ability to define the right questions.

There were many amazing contributions, including from Rocky Chen, Paul Vrbik, and Aneesha Bakharia in our School. Highlights included Pierre Benckendorff’s (Deputy Dean, Grad School) opening address on HDR skills and research culture, Stefan Hajkowicz’s (Chief Research Consultant, CSIRO) keynote on future “purple skills”, Sophia Arkinstall’s (Founder, AI & Society) talk on AI Literacy, the AI Expert Panel discussion chaired by Rocky Chen with EECS’s Paul Vrbik and EECS PhD graduates (Aninda Saha, Ashleigh Richardson, Shengyao Zhuang) contrasting different relationships with AI in work and life from managing AI agents, to preventing people from blindly trusting AI, and Aneesha Bakharia’s hands-on Vibe-Coding workshop, during which students built their own practical research apps.

The showcase celebrated student creativity and dedication through multiple award categories, with EECS’s Feng Luo winning People’s Choice Best Presentation. Thanks to the EECS judges and attendees! Full summary and photos of the event are available here.

On 26 January, in collaboration with scientists from CommBank and NUS, CIRES Chief Investigator, Dr Rocky Chen, and Dr Joel Mackenzie organized a workshop “Agentic AI in Financial Services” at the AAAI’26 conference in Singapore. This workshop aimed to promote recent advances in the intersection of Agentic Systems, FinTech, Information Retrieval, and Personalized Recommendation. The workshop featured oral and poster presentations of accepted papers, as well as three keynotes given by Machine Learning/FinTech experts Feng Liu (UniMelb), Hari Suresh (Nvidia), and Guansong Pang (SMU), and was well-attended by 55+ delegates on the day. Notably, among the 224 authors of 22 accepted papers, 35.3% are industry-affiliated, including those from BlackRock, JP Morgan, VISA, and Alibaba – the financial industry sector is putting real investments in agentic FinTech systems!

Earlier this month, CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq, had the honour of being invited to her old high school – ICG:Islamabad College for Girls.

“It was so much more than a trip down memory lane. This is a state school, with free education for over 6000 girls. It was much smaller when I was there! The calibre of the students (check out the podcast) and the dedication of the staff was nothing short of inspirational. Such examples, especially in a developing country like Pakistan, give me lots of confidence in our future leaders. Go ICG! And a shout out to the many collaborators I have the privilege of knowing, who are champions of girls’ education and women in technology.

Some years ago, I had come across the work of Paul Hawken and the Drawdown project where the ‘Analysis of 125 countries shows that education (particularly female education) is the single most important socioeconomic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.'”

Great experience representing CIRES at AJCAI 2025 in Canberra!

On 2 December, CIRES hosted both a workshop and a panel discussion on resilient and responsible AI systems. A special highlight was having Dr Yanbin Liu join our panel, his insights added great depth to the discussion!

Thanks to Xuwei (Ackesnal) Xu, Haodong Hong and Zhuoxiao Chen for their excellent presentations, and to everyone who attended our workshop.

And special thanks to organiser, CIRES Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr Zixin Wang, for her dedication and excellent coordination.