Thank you to all our delegates and speakers who participated in the CIRES Information Resilience PhD School 2023!

Please see the Resources Tab for photos, videos, posters, and slides from the 2023 event.

Watch the 2023 Highlights Video

Congratulations to our 2023 Award Winners

Three-Minute-Thesis Competition 

Winner: Hrishi Patel from The University of Queensland
Can We Predict Sepsis with Machine Learning? 

Runner-up: Ensiyeh Javaherian Pour from The University of Melbourne
Underground Utility Networks 

People’s choice: Jessica Hintzsche from The University of Queensland
Digital Twins in Aquaculture 

Poster Session 

Winner: Thisarani Ediriweera from James Cook University
Decrypting Barramundi’s Disease Resistance Code: Interactions, Genetics & Genomic Selection  

Runner-up: Huy Nguyen from The University of Queensland
Sepsis prediction for paediatric patients – inpatient (ICU) environment 

People’s choice: Lufan Zhang from Swinburne University of Technology
Practice-based perspective towards Explainable AI (XAI) in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) 

Data Literacy 

Winner: Pa Pa Khin from Swinburne University of Technology 

Runner-up: Masoud Kamali from The University of Melbourne 

What is CIRES?

Headquartered at The University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, the ARC Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) is built on strong foundations of responsible data science research, in collaboration with Swinburne University of Technology, and current partners Aginic, Astral Consulting, Allianz Worldwide Partners (AWP) Australia, Health & Wellbeing Queensland, Department of Education, Queensland Health, and the Queensland Police Service. The Centre brings together end-users, technology providers, and cutting-edge research, to lift the socio-technical barriers to data driven transformation and develop resilient data pipelines capable of delivering game-changing productivity gains that position Australian organisations at the forefront of technology leadership and value creation from data assets.

Who should attend the PhD School in 2023?

Are you an Australian-based PhD candidate, or planning to commence a PhD in Australia? Is data-driven analysis a major part of your research? In CIRES, we are pursuing the following goals concerning how data is acquired, managed, and utilised:

• Data quality assurance, which plays a central role in ensuring accurate, reliable, and consistent data, forming the foundation for informed decision-making and successful business operations.
• Responsible data modelling, which involves conscientious and ethical practices, emphasizing transparency, privacy protection, and the transparent use of data to derive meaningful insights with societal considerations?
• Creativity in value maximisation from data-driven research, which lies in the ability to think outside the box and leverage innovative approaches to unlock hidden opportunities from the vast potential of data.

If any of our goals rings a bell, then the Information Resilience PhD School is the right place for you! The Information Resilience PhD School offers a 2-day program from 30 to 31 October at The University of Melbourne for current or prospective PhD students interested in exploring and understanding cutting-edge data science practices, pathways towards academic or industry careers, and prospects of next-generation research in the field. The Information Resilience PhD School brings research students from Australian universities together with leading national and international researchers to enhance and invigorate research education, offering an opportunity to share and discuss research with both peers and mentors.

VIEW THE 2023 BROCHURE

What does the Information Resilience PhD School deliver?

Knowledge sharing and acquisition in data-driven research. A series of interactive activities including a keynote, tutorial, open discussion, and poster session will be hosted. Internationally renowned scholars will present techniques that enable, advance, and shape many research areas and applications today. These activities will cover the following topics (selectively listed):

• Data management and engineering
• Misinformation detection and control
• Data literacy
• The role of Generative AI, e.g., ChatGPT in today’s data-drive research

Mentorship from both academia and industry

The Information Resilience PhD School will feature industry leaders and world-class researchers sharing their experience in digital transformation, stories of data-driven R&D practices, and visions on next-generation information technologies. The dedicated activities include:

• Guest talks
• Panel sessions hosted by industry leaders and academics
• Mentoring and advising on research and professional development
• Experience sharing by early-career researchers

Social networking

The Information Resilience PhD School offers opportunities to engage with guest speakers, build connections with peers with common research interests and establish interdisciplinary collaborations with experts across domains. Our social networking events include:

• Interactive poster and presentation sessions with awards
• Welcome Session
• Banquet dinner

Important Dates 

• CLOSED 7th September 2023: Applications Due
• CLOSED 12th September 2023: ADC Travel Award applications Due
• CLOSED 15th September 2023: Successful Applicants Notified 
• CLOSED 30th September 2023: Registration Deadline for successful applicants 
• 30th-31st October 2023: Information Resilience PhD School 2023 

The 2023 Information Resilience PhD School was held at:

The University of Melbourne, Parkville

Getting to the Melbourne Connect Precinct.
Melbourne’s Free Tram Zone.

Details of this year’s program are available below. Or here is a link to a PDF version.

• Professor Jenny Zhang

  RMIT University

  Keynote: Trustworthy data science for social good

  Data science has been the driving  technology in the current age of artificial intelligence and has been applied to every corner of  society, from sharing information on social media to recommendation of items on E-commerce platforms.  Trustworthy data science is critical to ensure that predictions and decisions made based on data  are  transparent, fair and ethical. In this talk I will discuss some research we have conducted towards trustworthy data science for social good, including explainable rumour detection on social media, fair opinion summarisation, and responsible recommendation amidst the presence of misinformation.

  Xiuzhen (Jenny) Zhang is Professor of Data Science at RMIT University, Australia. Her research interests are data mining and machine learning, with a focus on text analysis  and social media data analysis.  She is especially interested in data science for social good, in areas such as misinformation detection and mitigation, law enforcement, and digital health. She has published over 100 papers in these areas. She is an associate editor of the journal Information Processing and Management, and  has served on the organising committee of international and Australian conferences such as KDD, PAKDD, EMNLP, IEEE DSAA, ALTW, and ADMA.

• Professor Gao Cong

  Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore

  Technical Tutorial: Geospatial entity representation: a step towards city foundation models

  The tutorial will begin with an overview of the recent research conducted by the speaker’s team. Subsequently, the rest of the tutorial will cover the following research problems on geospatial entity representation: 1) Geospatial Entity Representation for point objects, trajectory, and regions and their applications, e.g., spatial keyword search, speed inference, region population estimations, etc.  2) Application of Foundation Models for Geospatial Applications and Efforts toward City Foundation Models. The first part concentrates on learning representations to facilitate geospatial entity querying and analysis. The second part focuses on self-supervised learning approaches applied to geospatial entities.

  Gao Cong is currently a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and a co-director for Singtel Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Lab for Enterprises@NTU. Before joining NTU, he was an Assistant professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. Before that, he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, and as a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 2004. His current research interests include geospatial+X data management, machine learning for databases, geospatial data mining, and recommendation systems. His work has been published in reputable journals (e.g., VLDB Journal, TODS, TKDE) and conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, KDD, WSDM, SIGIR, WWW). He received the best paper runner-up awards at the WSDM’20 and WSDM’22 conferences for two of his research papers. His citation in Google Scholar was over 16000 with H-index 67. He served as a PC co-chair for ICDE’2022, the associate general chair of KDD’21, a PC co-chair for E&A track of VLDB 2014, and a PC vice-Chair for ICDE’18. He is an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) and the vice Chair of ACM KDD Singapore chapter.

• Professor Julian Thomas

  RMIT University

  Keynote: Society in the Loop: Observability and Accountability the era of Artificial Intelligence

   

  Julian Thomas is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His latest books are Wi-Fi (Polity 2021) and the Sage Handbook of the Digital Media Economy (Sage 2022). He has written widely about digital inclusion, automation and AI, among other topics concerning the social aspects of new communications and computing technologies.

• Professor Guido Zuccon

  The University of Queensland

  Interactive session on the use of ChatGPT for scientific research

   

  Professor Guido Zuccon is a Professorial Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, and the AI Director for the Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC), an Affiliate Professor at the UQ Centre for Health Services Research, Faculty of Medicine, and an Honorary Reader at Strathclyde University (UK). He leads the Information Engineering Lab (ielab), a research team working in Information Retrieval and Health Data Science. Guido’s main research interests are Information Retrieval, Health Search, Formal Models of Search and Search Interaction, and Health Data Science.

• Associate Professor Hassan Khosravi

  The University of Queensland

  Interactive session on Data Literacy

  The workshop will begin with a short introduction to data literacy and its critical role in today’s digital era. We will then shift our focus towards a highly interactive and participatory phase where the attendees will actively engage in creating a variety of bite-sized learning resources aimed at enhancing data literacy. In the third part of the session, we ask attendees to review and provide feedback on resources created by their peers. The co-created repository will serve as a valuable asset in our collective mission to bridge the data literacy gap and foster a community of informed, responsible, and empowered individuals in the digital age.

  Dr Hassan Khosravi is a CIRES Chief Investigator and Theme Leader, and Senior Lecturer in Data Science and Learning Analytics at The University of Queensland. As a computer scientist by training, he is passionate about the role of artificial intelligence in the future of education. In his research, he draws on theoretical insights from learning science and exemplary techniques from the fields of human-computer interaction, learning analytics and explainable AI to design, implement, validate and deliver technological solutions that contribute to the delivery of learner-centred, data-driven learning at scale. His past research and publications have addressed a number of diverse topics such as learning graphical models, statistical-relational learning, social network analysis, cybersecurity and game theory.

• Dr Renata Borovica-Gajic

  University of Melbourne, Australia

  Tips and tricks for effective PhD
  

  PhD is an exciting yet, at times, rather challenging journey. This talk covers the entire trajectory from thinking of embarking on a PhD journey, to choosing your advisor and the topic, to making sure you tick all the important boxes along the way and prepare yourself for the life post-PhD. We uncover the hidden challenges along the way, and share strategies to successfully tackle the problems you may encounter in this journey. Regardless of the stage you are at, there will be something for anyone, with heaps of practical advice offered to equip you with the skills needed to succeed in your PhD journey and beyond.

  Dr Renata Borovica-Gajic is a Senior Lecturer in Data Analytics and ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Computing and Information Systems (CIS), as well as Assistant Dean (Diversity and Inclusion) for the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Melbourne. Her research lies at the intersection of database systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence, data-driven optimisation and analytics. Her work has repeatedly appeared in premier data management outlets, including SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE conferences, as well as VLDB, TKDE, and CSUR journals. She is a recipient of several prestigious awards, including Excellence in Teaching and Learning (in 2018 and 2020), Research Excellence (in 2022), Research Highlights Award (in 2015), Google Award for Research Inclusion (in 2021), as well as Test of Time Award (at SIGMOD 2022).

• Dr Victor Fedyashov

  Senior Applied Scientist, Xero

  Panel: Research and innovation careers in industry

   

  Victor is a Senior Applied Scientist at Xero, where he’s been working in ML Products Division for the past 18 months. His prior experiences include a PhD in Maths from the University of Oxford, quantitative research in a London hedge fund, as well as Computational Modelling of Alzheimer’s disease at the University of Melbourne.

• Damian Felsbourg

  Joint Managing Director, Astral Consulting

  Panel: Research and innovation careers in industry

   

  Damian Felsbourg works as a Enterprise Information Management Consultant at Astral Consulting Services. Astral has been a leader in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) space for the past 10 years. Damian has over 15 years’ experience in the delivery of information management solutions across a variety of industries including Mining, Resources, Banking and Financial Services, Government, Insurance, Technology Services, Telecommunication, Energy and Utilities.

• Dr Karl Grieser

  Staff Applied Scientist, Xero

  Panel: Research and innovation careers in industry

   

  Karl is a Staff Applied Scientist working for the AI Products division of Xero, an accounting software company founded in New Zealand in 2007. He is an alumnus of the University of Melbourne, obtaining his PhD in Computer Science in 2012, and quickly transitioning to Data Science roles in industry after a short stint in postdoc academia. Over the past 10 years, Karl has worked in large corporations and smaller startups, gaining exposure to global scale data infrastructure, software engineering practices, cloud computing, product design and development and many many ways of doing science in industry.

   

• Dr Fernando Mourao

  Principal Responsible AI Leader, SEEK Limited

  Panel: Research and innovation careers in industry

   

  Fernando is a former Computer Science professor and Data Scientist, passionate about solving problems. He has over a decade of experience in ML and Recommender Systems, with extensive contributions to industry and academia. Recently, he has dedicated himself to learning and contributing to the exciting challenge of operationalising RAI in the industry, focusing on bridging the gap between conceptual and technical perspectives.

• Dr Mingfang Wu

  Senior Research Data Specialist, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)

  Panel: Research and innovation careers in industry

   

  Dr. Mingfang Wu works as product manager at Australian Research Data Commons and is a practitioner and researcher in the research data discovery space. She is a member of the Research Data Alliance Technical Advisory Board.  Among Mingfang’s research interests are interactive information retrieval, data discovery, search log analysis, and natural language processing. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1206-3431

• Dr Rocky Chen

  The University of Queensland

  Welcome and PhD School Chair

  Dr Rocky Tong Chen is the Chair of the 2023 Information Resilience PhD School, and CIRES Chief Investigator. He is currently a Lecturer in Business Analytics with Data Science Group at The University of Queensland. Before that, he received his PhD degree in Computer Science from The University of Queensland in 2020. His research work has been published on top venues like SIGIR, SIGKDD, ICDE, WWW, ICDM, IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, TOIS, TKDE, etc., where his research interests include data mining, machine learning, recommender systems, and predictive analytics.

• Professor Shazia Sadiq

  The University of Queensland

  Opening address: Introduction to CIRES and the PhD School

  Professor Shazia Sadiq is the CIRES Centre Director and a research and education leader in data science at The University of Queensland. Her research track record has focused on overcoming challenges that stem from disparate IT systems and result in information silos, and she has developed new methods that to tackle these challenges through integrated solutions for information quality and effective use. Shazia is passionate about the positive impact emerging technologies from data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence can have on our future. She advocates for the responsible and ethical technology developments and believe strongly that these developments require trans-disciplinary collaborations between research, industry, government and community.

How to Apply

The Information Resilience PhD School is an in-person event and open only to Australian based students. Capacity is limited to 50 attendees only. Attendees will be selected based on the relevance of their research backgrounds and interests to School topics.

You will receive notification by 15th SEPTEMBER. If accepted, you will also receive additional information about attending the PhD School.  

There is NO registration charge to attend the Information Resilience PhD School. 

CIRES Travel Grants

Travel Grants were made available for this year’s event.

Option 1: PhD School Only Travel Grants

Up to 20 x PhD School Only Travel Grants are available for Australian based students, who live outside Melbourne, to subsidise travel and 2-nights accommodation costs to attend the PhD School. The grants are worth up to a maximum of $1,000 and would be reimbursed based on receipts.

Option 2: ADC + PhD School Travel Grants

Up to 5 x ADC-PhD School Travel Grants are available for Australian based students who live outside Melbourne, to subsidise travel and up to 5-nights accommodation to attend both the PhD School and the Australasian Database Conference. The grants are worth up to a maximum of $1,500 and would be reimbursed based on receipts. To be eligible, you must be a student author presenting at ADC, and proof of ADC registration will be required.

PROGRAM Dr Rocky Chen tong.chen@uq.edu.au

APPLICATIONS or TRAVEL GRANTS cires@uq.edu.au

ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience
The University of Queensland
Brisbane Qld 4072 Australia
E cires@uq.edu.au
W cires.org.au

Watch the 2023 Highlights Video

2023 Presentations on YouTube

• Professor Jenny Zhang, Keynote Talk and Presentation Slides

• Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas, Keynote Talk

• Professor Gao Cong, Technical Tutorial Presentation Slides, and recordings Part 1 and Part 2

• Dr Renata Borovica-Gajic, Invited Talk and Presentation Slides

• Panel Discussion: Research and innovation careers in industry

Interactive Sessions

• Professor Guido Zuccon, ChatGPT for scientific research, Session Slides

• Associate Professor Hassan Khosravi, Data Literacy, Session Slides

2023 PhD School Photo Gallery

Research Poster Gallery