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:
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.'”
We are recruiting for a Level A postdoc fellow to join us in the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at The University of Queensland in sunny Brisbane, Australia.
This position will contribute to cutting-edge research on AI preparedness and the evaluation of AI deployments across public and private sectors. You’ll develop frameworks to assess organisational and data barriers to AI adoption, evaluate implementation outcomes, and analyse the impact of emerging AI policies, standards, and governance guidelines.
This role is mainly based at the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at The University of Queensland working closely with leading experts and industry partners. You’ll be supported by senior academics with opportunities for increasing autonomy over time.
We are seeking a candidate with:
This position will be based in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) at UQ, and working across multiple projects with industry and government partners, providing a wealth of experience in multi-disciplinary teams, research planning, and industry and public sector dynamics. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work directly with the Centre’s partners, with an expected third of their time dedicated to working with partner organisations.
Questions? For more information about this opportunity, please contact Professor Shazia Sadiq and Professor Marta Indulska.
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.
CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq contributed to creating the UQ Guide on Responsible Use of Generative AI in Research, available to all staff at The University of Queensland. The Guide outlines risks and opportunities across the research lifecycle—idea generation, literature review, hypothesis development, coding, data analysis, manuscript preparation, and visualisation. It includes discipline-specific examples, guidance for grant applications (ARC/NHMRC), disclosure requirements, and an appendix on data handling, copyright, and privacy implications.
On 12th November 2025, the UQ Centre for Enterprise AI hosted the workshop “Getting from Proof of Concept to Production for Enterprise AI.” With over 50 participants joining from industry, government, and academia, the conversation focused on the systematic challenges facing organisations in implementing Enterprise AI at scale, and the key measures to consider when evaluating success in AI adoption and integration. The panel discussion moderated by Nicole Hartley focused on unlocking AI value beyond POC and what it takes to get there. Panel members were Ryan van Leent (SAP), Nathan Bines (Qld Gov’t), Ida Asadi (UQBS) and Joel Mackenzie (EECS), with the event led by CIRES Centre Director, Prof Shazia Sadiq, and CIRES Centre Research Director, Prof Marta Indulska (photo below). More details here and you can find out more about the Centre here.
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 21 October, CIRES Centre Director Prof. Shazia Sadiq hosted a panel of international experts on “Building Trust Through Conceptual Modelling” at the 44th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2025, in France.
CIRES Partner Investigator and Queensland Police Service (QPS) staff, Mr Nicholas Moss, attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP 2025) Annual Conference and Exposition in Denver Colorado USA, 18-21 October 2025. Nicholas presented results from the CIRES-QPS project on community-engagement on the use of data. This project aims to understand community attitudes towards data analytics, particularly in policing.
CIRES Centre Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq, participated as a panelist at the:
(Part of EECS Data Science Discipline HDR Student Support)
📍 Date & Time: October 13, 2025, 1:00–4:00 PM
📍 Location: 46-402 Seminar/Board Room (Andrew Liveris Building)
The UQ AI Conference Dry Run Seminar Series is an initiative launched by the UQ EECS Data Science Discipline to support our HDR student community. This inaugural event marks the beginning of a recurring seminar series designed to help our students shine on the global stage.
The goals of the series are to:
Format: 10-minute presentation + 5-minute Q&A session
This series will serve as a training ground for students preparing to present at major venues, while also offering the UQ community a front-row seat to the innovative AI research being developed within our faculty.
On 7-8 October, CIRES CI Professor Gianluca Demartini participated in the UQ-University of Zurich (UZH) Symposium: Challenges and Opportunities for Social and System Change, presenting an update on the joint UQ-UZH project on Digital Deliberative Democracy (d3-project.ch) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and as well as serving as the expert responder for the UQ-UZH public lecture A Toolbox for Human-AI Collaboration in Lifespan Health Analysis.
On 8 October, CIRES CI A/Prof Hassan Khosravi moderated a panel as part of the free 2025 on Empowering Learners in the Age of AI.
Hassan moderated this panel with Professor Jason M. Lodge (The University of Queensland), Dr Aneesha Bakharia (The University of Queensland) and Peter Xing (Microsoft) as distinguished panellists, bringing deep expertise and diverse perspectives to this important conversation.
Why this matters
The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated clear performance gains for students. Yet performance is only part of the story. Scholars caution that polished outputs may come at the expense of genuine learning, as students risk offloading critical thinking and problem-solving to AI. This panel explores how we can move beyond productivity to design AI learning companions that prioritise learning gains over performance gains, nurturing curiosity, understanding, and deeper engagement.
Many health data breaches aren’t just caused by hackers. Inadequate processes and irresponsible use of health data often create opportunities for serious cybersecurity incidents. In our study, experts recounted staff admitting, “I didn’t know, nobody told me,” or using personal Gmail for sensitive communications. One cybersecurity expert observed, “[Healthcare ecosystems] are not good at these things [data protection by design]. We say that they don’t bake in security; they just bake the cake and spray on some [cyber]security.”
Our mixed-methods study, published in Behaviour & Information Technology (open access explored these critical vulnerabilities in health data protection. We gathered insights from cybersecurity and privacy experts across 14 countries, including CISOs, IT security officers, researchers, privacy managers, and Data Protection Officers.
We identified 30 failure factors and, using the People-Process-Technology framework, unpacked the top seven:
These factors often interlink, creating complex vulnerabilities. With the growing adoption of big data analytics and AI in healthcare, understanding these failure points is crucial. Our model offers actionable insights for healthcare organisations to strengthen data protection, develop mitigation policies, and reduce the risk of breaches, ensuring safer care and maintaining trust.
Towards a model for understanding failures in health data protection: a mixed-methods study, Javad Pool, Saeed Akhlaghpour, Farkhondeh Hassandoust, Farhad Fatehi & Andrew Burton-Jones
On 22 September, CIRES Centre Director Prof. Shazia Sadiq FTSE hosted AI Horizons – Conversations with Australia’s leading and emerging researchers, an inspiring event organised by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE). The event brought together brilliant minds in AI—from established experts to rising stars—to explore the future of artificial intelligence in Australia.
Speakers: Dr Sue Keay FTSE UNSW AI Institute, Dr Scarlett Raine & Prof. Michael Milford FTSE QUT Centre for Robotics, & Hung Lee & Distinguished Prof. Svetha Venkatesh FTSE FAA Deakin University.
Watch on YouTube: AI horizons – Conversations with Australia’s leading and emerging researchers
Excited to share our paper “EMIT: Event-Based Masked Auto Encoding for Irregular Time Series” published at ICDM 2024. Together with A/Prof. Sen WANG, Dr Ruihong Qiu, A/Prof. Adam Irwin and Prof. Shazia Sadiq, we explore how irregular time series (like vital signs and lab results recorded at uneven intervals) challenge existing AI models and how our proposed framework, EMIT, improves clinical decision support through better representation learning. Special thanks to CIRES, Queensland Health and The University of Queensland for supporting this research.
Our Approach
We introduce EMIT, a pretraining framework based on transformer architecture, tailored for irregular clinical time series data. EMIT learns by:
Key Findings
Improved Representation Learning: EMIT captures important variations without losing timing information, outperforming generic pretext approaches for irregular time series.
Data Efficiency: On benchmark healthcare datasets (MIMIC-III & PhysioNet Challenge 2012), EMIT achieved strong results using only 50% of labeled data, reducing reliance on costly annotations.
Task Relevance: By designing pretext tasks specific to irregular time series, EMIT delivers more reliable clinical predictions compared to standard forecasting approaches.
How can we design AI that adapts to the messy, irregular reality of clinical data while still delivering trustworthy predictions?
On 22 August, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) released Made in Australia – Our AI Opportunity, a bold action statement co-authored by CIRES Centre Director Shazia Sadiq and CIRES Strategy Board Member Sue Keay, calling for strategic investment in sovereign AI capability. The report proposes a mission-based approach, including the creation of AI factories—regional hubs for talent, research, and innovation—to ensure Australia’s position as a global leader in safe, sustainable, ethical, and high-impact sovereign AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is radically reshaping work, education and security in Australia, and is officially recognised as a critical technology in government policy. How we harness it will impact the nation’s economic prosperity, national security and continuing innovation.
The global race to build AI capabilities is accelerating, and it is incumbent on us to harness our comparative advantages and secure control of our data and digital systems. Without timely and comprehensive public and private investments in sovereign AI capability, Australia runs the risk of becoming dependent on foreign technology providers with their own commercial and national interests.
Australia already has the ingredients to develop sovereign AI capability, and is ready to leverage these, with appropriate government leadership and investment. ATSE proposes a mission-based approach, with AI factories located across Australia: the jewel in the AI crown around which talent and partnerships will develop. This statement outlines how targeted investment in a strong national AI capability can position Australia as a global leader in safe, sustainable, ethical and high-impact sovereign AI. It shows how these investments will give us the autonomy we want as a nation whilst enhancing productivity and prepare the nation for future transitions in manufacturing and knowledge work, unlocking value across the entire economy.
This statement builds on ATSE’s 2022 vision statement, Strategic Investment in Australia’s Artificial Intelligence Capacity.
On 20 August 2025 we celebrated our Centre’s 4th birthday with UQ and Swinburne colleagues, and four years of research collaboration, impactful partnerships, and a growing a community dedicated to building a more resilient, inclusive, and ethical digital future. Since our launch in 2021, CIRES has:
We reviewed our 2021-2025 YTD performance stats (see pics), and after that effort, we thought we definitely deserved two cakes to celebrate.
From our Director, Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE: “CIRES was founded with a bold vision — to reduce socio-technical barriers to data driven transformation. Four years on, I’m proud of how far we’ve come and grateful to our team and collaborators who continue to pursue our mission of Information Resilience.”
We’re proud of what we’ve achieved — and even more excited about what’s ahead, including our first PhD graduates. Thank you to our researchers, partners, and supporters who have been part of this journey.
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.
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.