People
Image credit: The University of Queensland
PhD Researchers
Samual MacDonald
The University of Queensland
PhD Researcher
Samual MacDonald joined the Centre as its first PhD Researcher in October 2021. He completed his Master of Data Science at UQ and has a Bachelor of Engineering with Honours from James Cook University. He has four years of data science experience working at various schools within The University of Queensland, CSIRO, Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, and Max Kelsen. Samual is interested in communicating AI’s inherent risks with concepts from uncertainty and causality. Samual’s PhD project “Advancing Deep Neural Network Reliability During Dataset Shift” is a collaboration with industry partner Max Kelsen and supervised by Dr Fred Roosta-Khorasani, Dr Maciej Trzaskowski, and Dr Quan Nguyen.
Samual is excited by the diverse range of topics, partners, and ways of thinking that CIRES hosts and believes this diversity provides a unique opportunity to (collaboratively) make valuable discoveries for real-world applications.
Daisy Xu
The University of Queensland
PhD Researcher
Daisy Xu joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in February 2022 and is based at The University of Queensland. Daisy is a UQ MBA alumna and graduated in 2003, with multiple years of experience working with global consulting firms. Daisy started her professional career in market research and business consulting, and then extended her interest into management consulting. Recently, Daisy has been focusing on organisational studies, helping organisations to improve productivity through workforce analytics and planning.
Daisy’s PhD project “Defining and Measuring Analytics Value” is a collaboration with industry partner Aginic and supervised by Professor Marta Indulska, Dr Ida Asadi Someh, and Emma Freya (Aginic).
Daisy is inspired by the Centre’s vision that we aim to drive industry growth and competitiveness by linking research and practice, and she is looking forward to her journey with CIRES.
Krishna Dermawan
The University of Queensland
PhD Researcher
Krishna Dermawan joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in February 2022 and is based at The University of Queensland. Krishna’s contribution to research and pedagogy extends from his undergraduate days in UNSW where he received his First Class Honours and a Vice Chancellor’s Award for Tutoring. In parallel to his teaching, Krishna gained professional experience working as a data-analyst in finance, tourism, and e-commerce. His previous professional role was as head of analytics for the Indonesian technology company, Tokopedia.
Krishna’s PhD project “Improving Sepsis Management through Better Data and Rapid Learning” is a collaboration with government partner Queensland Health and is supervised by Professor Marta Indulska, Dr Ida Asadi Someh, Professor Andrew Burton-Jones, and Dr Adam Irwin (Queensland Health). He is excited by both the application of university learning and research to enable industry work, and the application of industry-skills and knowledge to further academic research. He is looking forward to collaborating with colleagues in UQ, CIRES and Queensland Health to improve patient outcomes.
Lufan Zhang
Swinburne University of Technology
PhD Researcher
Lufan Zhang joined the Centre in March 2022 as a PhD Researcher based at Swinburne University of Technology, in the School of Business, Law and Entrepreneurship (SOBLE). Lufan holds a Bachelor of Science in Computing and Enterprise systems from the Macau Polytechnic Institute, and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne. Her research interests concern improvements on Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA), information governance, and Forensic Data Analytics (FDA), primarily focusing on the commercial context. Lufan’s PhD project “Information Architecture and Forensic Data Analysis” is a collaboration with industry partner Astral Consulting, and is supervised by Chief Investigator Dr Paul Scifleet, Associate Professor Amir Aryani, and partner investigator Marie Felsbourg, Manager Director at Astral. Lufan is looking forward to getting the most out of her PhD study and gaining valuable experience in working with CIRES partners and excited by the opportunities to collaborate with other researchers in the Centre.
Hechuan Wen
The University of Queensland
PhD Researcher
Hechuan Wen joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in April 2022 and is based at The University of Queensland. He has a B.Eng. degree in Aerospace Engineering from Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics (NUAA) and obtained his Master’s in Business Analytics from University of Sydney (USYD) with a dissertation working on causal structure learning.
His research interests lie in innovating machine learning algorithms in causal inference under a potential outcome framework, and in learning Pearl’s structural causal model theory.
His PhD project “Using Data to Overcome Wellbeing Challenges Across the Life Spectrum” is a collaboration with government partner Health & Wellbeing Queensland and supervised by Dr Rocky Chen, with Associate Professor Hongzhi Yin, Professor Andrew Burton-Jones, Professor Shazia Sadiq, and partner investigator Dr Li Kheng Chai from Health & Wellbeing Queensland.
Hechuan is looking forward to making real-world impact by combining big data and AI to support decision making for policy maker in the healthcare sector.
Elyas Meguellati
The University of Queensland
PhD Researcher
Elyas Meguellati joined the Centre as a PhD Researcher in January 2023 and is based at The University of Queensland. Elyas has a master’s degree in applied computing from the University of Malaya. His interests include natural language processing and deep learning.
His PhD project “Customer Data Stories ” is a collaboration with industry partner Allianz Worldwide Partners (AWP Australia) supervised by Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini, Professor Shazia Sadiq, Dr Wen Hua, and Partner Investigator Mr Shane Downey.
Elyas is motivated by the Centre’s ambitious objective of fostering industry expansion and excellence through the integration of theoretical and practical endeavors, and is looking forward to his PhD journey with CIRES.
Postdoctoral Research Fellows
Junliang Yu
The University of Queensland
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Junliang Yu joined the Centre as its first Postdoctoral Research Fellow in January 2023. He is based at The University of Queensland and his work will particularly focus on dealing with data sparsity and noise problems in real-world datasets, and on promoting algorithmic transparency.
During his PhD, he published over 10 peer-reviewed papers in the most prestigious conferences including the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), World Wide Web (WWW), IEEE’s International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), AAAI, the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), and journals including IEEE’s Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TDKE) and the International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (VLDBJ).
Junliang’s research interests are data mining and machine learning, with a particular focus on recommender systems, tiny machine learning, and self-supervised learning. He will work closely with Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq and CIRES Chief Investigator Associate Professor Hongzhi Yin.
He is looking forward to building successful collaborative relationships across the Centre and making great contributions to CIRES.
Hui Yin
Swinburne University of Technology
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Hui Yin joined the Centre as our first Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology in February 2023. Her research focus includes natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining, with an emphasis on online social media text mining.
Hui received her PhD in Data Science from Deakin University in June 2022, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University before joining CIRES. She will work closely with Chief Investigator Associate Professor Amir Aryani.
She is looking forward to working with CIRES partners and researchers across the Centre.
Executive Committee
Professor Shazia Sadiq
The University of Queensland
Centre Director
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 focussed 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.
Professor Marta Indulska
The University of Queensland
Research Director
Professor Marta Indulska is the CIRES Research Director and Leader of the Business Information Systems discipline at The University of Queensland Business School. Marta’s research interests include IT business value, data quality, business process management and open innovation, primarily focusing on using technology as an enabler of increased organisational effectiveness. She has worked with organisations in the retail, consulting and non-profit sectors to provide guidance on a variety of topics, including digital strategy, business process improvement, and emerging technologies and platforms for innovation.
Kate Aldridge
The University of Queensland
Centre Manager
Kate is the CIRES Centre Manager and responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Centre. She joined the University of Queensland after 13 years at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where she was the Centre Manager for the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision and the QUT Centre for Robotics. Kate is passionate about creating welcoming and inclusive workplaces and dedicated to creating supportive research training environments.
Dr Hassan Khosravi
The University of Queensland
Theme Leader
Dr Hassan Khosravi is a 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.
Assoc. Prof. Gianluca Demartini
The University of Queensland
Theme Leader
Dr. Gianluca Demartini is an Associate Professor in Data Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. His main research interests include Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, and Human Computation. His research is currently funded by the Australian Research Council, Facebook, and Google. He received Best Paper awards at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) in 2018, at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in 2016 and 2020, and the Best Demo award at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2011. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications including papers at major venues such as WWW, ACM SIGIR, VLDBJ, ISWC, and ACM CHI. He is an ACM Senior Member, ACM Distinguished Speaker, TEDx speaker, and CIKM 2021 General co-chair.
Dr Fred Roosta-Khorasani
The University of Queensland
Theme Leader
Fred is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland. He is also an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS) and Distinguished Research Scholar at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) Berkeley, USA.
Assoc. Prof. Amir Aryani
Swinburne University of Technology
Theme Leader
Amir Aryani is the Head of the Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab in the Social Innovation Research Institute. The Lab applies contemporary and emerging co-op data analytics techniques to provide insight into health and social problems. Amir has experience with large-scale and cross-institution projects in Australia and Europe. His track records include collaboration with high-profile international institutions such as British Library, ORCID (U.S), Data Archiving and Network Analysis (DANS, Netherlands), Institution for the Social Sciences in Germany (GESIS), and funders including ARC, NHMRC, and NIH. He is an experienced project leader on initiatives involving creating and leading data-driven projects and using data modelling, information retrieval techniques, and real-time data analysis. He has published articles in high impact journals such as Nature Scientific Data, Metadata and Semantics Research, and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.
Dr Ida Asadi Someh
The University of Queensland
Theme Leader
Dr Ida Asadi Someh is a senior lecturer in the Business Information Systems discipline at the UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Information Systems Research (CISR), MIT Sloan School of Management, US. Her research focuses on organizational and societal impact of data, analytics and artificial intelligence. She completed her PhD in 2015 at The University of Melbourne and was awarded the best PhD thesis in Melbourne School of Engineering, and the Vice Chancellor’s PhD Prize at The University of Melbourne.
Kathleen Williamson
The University of Queensland
Centre Coordinator
Kathleen is the CIRES Centre Coordinator assisting with events and communications as well as Centre operations. She was previously the Manager of the ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure, an ARC initiative, spanning 18 Australian universities and five private and government sector partners, to improve the quality, impact and visibility of Australian ICT research, through networking, collaboration and fostering research opportunities. Kathleen has extensive experience in event coordination from international summits, academic conferences to student focused engagement activities.
Chief Investigators
Assoc. Prof. Amir Aryani
Swinburne University of Technology
Chief Investigator
Amir Aryani is the Head of the Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab in the Social Innovation Research Institute. The Lab applies contemporary and emerging co-op data analytics techniques to provide insight into health and social problems. Amir has experience with large-scale and cross-institution projects in Australia and Europe. His track records include collaboration with high-profile international institutions such as British Library, ORCID (U.S), Data Archiving and Network Analysis (DANS, Netherlands), Institution for the Social Sciences in Germany (GESIS), and funders including ARC, NHMRC, and NIH. He is an experienced project leader on initiatives involving creating and leading data-driven projects and using data modelling, information retrieval techniques, and real-time data analysis. He has published articles in high impact journals such as Nature Scientific Data, Metadata and Semantics Research, and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.
Dr Ida Asadi Someh
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Dr Ida Asadi Someh is a senior lecturer in the Business Information Systems discipline at the UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Information Systems Research (CISR), MIT Sloan School of Management, US. Her research focuses on organizational and societal impact of data, analytics and artificial intelligence. She completed her PhD in 2015 at The University of Melbourne and was awarded the best PhD thesis in Melbourne School of Engineering, and the Vice Chancellor’s PhD Prize at The University of Melbourne.
Professor Andrew Burton-Jones
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Andrew graduated from UQ’s Commerce program in 1998 and worked for several years in IT risk management for one of the Big-4 accounting/consulting firms. He then moved to Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA, to complete his Ph.D., followed by seven years at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he became a tenured Associate Professor. He returned to UQ in May 2012. Andrew has a particular interest in IT governance and control, IT development, and IT strategy. He undertakes research in three areas: how effectively organisations use IT; how to improve methods to analyse and design IT systems; and how to improve theories and methods used by researchers in the Information Systems discipline. He has published in and served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and other outlets. He recently completed a term as Representative for the Americas for the Association of Information Systems and commenced a term as International Representative for the Academy of Management (OCIS Division).
Assoc. Prof. Gianluca Demartini
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Dr. Gianluca Demartini is an Associate Professor in Data Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. His main research interests include Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, and Human Computation. His research is currently funded by the Australian Research Council, Facebook, and Google. He received Best Paper awards at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) in 2018, at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in 2016 and 2020, and the Best Demo award at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2011. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications including papers at major venues such as WWW, ACM SIGIR, VLDBJ, ISWC, and ACM CHI. He is an ACM Senior Member, ACM Distinguished Speaker, TEDx speaker, and CIKM 2021 General co-chair.
Professor Marta Indulska
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Professor Marta Indulska is the CIRES Research Director and Leader of the Business Information Systems discipline at The University of Queensland Business School. Marta’s research interests include IT business value, data quality, business process management and open innovation, primarily focusing on using technology as an enabler of increased organisational effectiveness. She has worked with organisations in the retail, consulting and non-profit sectors to provide guidance on a variety of topics, including digital strategy, business process improvement, and emerging technologies and platforms for innovation.
Dr Hassan Khosravi
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Dr Hassan Khosravi is a 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.
Professor Chengfei Liu
Swinburne University of Technology
Chief Investigator
Professor Chengfei Liu is leader of Swinburne’s Web and Data Engineering research group and the focus area leader of Knowledge and Data Intensive Systems in Swinburne’s tier-1 Centre for Computing and Engineering Software Systems (SUCCESS). Professor Liu’s current research interests include web data management (keyword queries, uncertain data, query processing, view rewriting, stream data and query relaxation), advanced database systems (big data management, graph data management, keyword searches on graph data, query refinement and data provenance, RDF databases) and workflows (artifact-centric models, web service transactions, collaborative business processes, and business process views).
Dr Fred Roosta-Khorasani
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Fred is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland. He is also an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS) and Distinguished Research Scholar at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) Berkeley, USA.
Professor Shazia Sadiq
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
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 focussed 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 responsible and ethical technology developments and believe strongly that these developments require trans-disciplinary collaborations between research, industry, government and community.
Dr Paul Scifleet
Swinburne University of Technology
Chief Investigator
Before joining the Department of Business Technology and Entrepreneurship (BTE), Paul held positions with the Discipline of Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney and the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management at the University of New South Wales. He has been a visiting Scholar with the Information School at the University of Sheffield and the Royal School Library and Information Science, Copenhagen and Research Fellow with the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University. Paul is currently a research affiliate with the Information Design Lab, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany and Centre for Social Impact Research Fellow for Semester 2, 2019 at Swinburne University of Technology.
Dr Thomas Taimre
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Thomas Taimre is Senior Lecturer of Mathematics and Statistics and received his BSc (Mathematics and Statistics) in 2003, BSc (Hons. I, Statistics) in 2004, and Ph.D. (Mathematics) in 2009, all from The University of Queensland, Australia. His current research is at the interface of probability theory, computer simulation, and mathematical optimization with biological and other scientific, engineering, and finance disciplines.
Dr Sen Wang
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Currently, I am a lecturer and an ARC DECRA Fellow (Australia Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) in School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) in the University of Queensland (UQ). I am also an adjunct senior research fellow in Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS) in Griffith University (GU). Previously, I worked as a lecture of computer science in School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in GU from July 2016 to January 2019. I received my PhD degree in UQ in 2014. Between Jan 2014 and July 2016, I have been an ARC post-doctoral research fellow in UQ. My research interest includes various topics on Feature Selection, Semi-supervised Learning, Deep Learning, Pattern Recognition, and Data Mining. Also, I have always been concentrating on significant applications using AI and Data Mining techniques, such as health informatics and social media analysis. My CV can be found at here.
Assoc. Prof. Hongzhi Yin
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
A/Prof. Hongzhi Yin works as an associate professor with The University of Queensland, Australia. He was recognized as Field Leader of Data Mining & Analysis in The Australian’s Research 2020 magazine. He received his doctoral degree from Peking University in July 2014, and his PhD Thesis won the highly competitive Distinguished Doctor Degree Thesis Award of Peking University. His current main research interests include recommender system, graph embedding and mining, chatbots, social media analytics and mining, edge machine learning, trustworthy machine learning, decentralized and federated learning, and smart healthcare. He has published 160+ papers, including 15 publications in Top 1% (CNCI).
Partner Investigators
Mr Shane Downey
Allianz Partners
Partner Investigator
Shane Downey is the General Manager, Enterprise Data Management at Allianz Partners Australia. He has made significant contributions to a variety of organisations over a career spanning 20+ years, including Government, banking and insurance, finance, wealth management, retail, manufacturing, and health. Shane is also a part-time academic researcher in the field of data quality with The University of Queensland, Mater HEALTH and Mater RESEARCH.
Ms Marie Felsbourg
Astral Consulting
Partner Investigator
Marie Felsbourg has over 30 years’ experience in the Information Technology industry covering all aspects of software application development, and the implementation of major systems and applications. As the founder and director of Astral Consulting, she has developed an Information Management (IM) organization that provides customers with independent, vendor-neutral advice about the best strategy for managing their information. Astral also partners with leading business organisation to implement business solutions that increase the value of their information assets by aligning unstructured information assets with business process and structured information in enterprise applications such as market leading ERP, CRM, Engineering Asset and HSE solutions. Marie has also been instrumental in the initiation and setup of an industry association, Information Governance ANZ, and is active in student education through an Intern and Graduate program and guest Lectures at Swinburne and RMIT Universities.
Mr James Hinchliffe
Queensland Police Service
Partner Investigator
James is the Director of Research and AnalyticsQueensland Police Service.
Dr Adam Irwin
The University of Queensland and Children’s Health Queensland
Partner Investigator
Dr Adam Irwin is a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and conjoint Senior Lecturer and academic lead for paediatric infectious disease at The University of Queensland and Queensland Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on the optimal use of antimicrobials in children, including the early recognition of invasive infections like sepsis, and on the most appropriate treatment of healthcare-associated and antimicrobial resistant infections in children. He is the medical co-chair of the Queensland Paediatric Sepsis Program which was awarded the Global Sepsis Alliance award in 2020, and leads a national study of invasive Gram-negative infections in Australian children
Contact Adam
Twitter @adamdirwin
Professor Lizbeth Kenny AO
Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital
Partner Investigator
Prof Lizbeth Kenny is a Senior Radiation Oncologist at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, and is the Medical Director of Queensland Clinical Network Executives. Liz is committed to research that is outcome focussed, aiming to both improve cure and reduce the morbidity of cancer treatment and has brought together a number of clinical and research teams on the Herston campus with this aim. She has served as the Dean of the Faculty of Radiation Oncology, and as President of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists. Liz was awarded an officer of the order of Australia (AO) in 2017.
Assoc. Prof. Paula Lister
Queensland Health
Partner Investigator
A/Prof Paula Lister is the Director of Paediatric Critical Care Unit at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital. As a Senior Paediatric Intensivist and clinical researcher, A/Prof Lister has experience and expertise in running international multi-centre clinical trials and studies in critically ill children, particularly involving severe infection and sepsis. International trials include RESOLVE, Hyp-HIT, TRIPICU, CHIP, CATCH, Cool-NEC, USII, as well as national trials in the UK and Australia associated with UK PICS-SG (Paediatric Intensive Care Society Study Group), ANZIC PSG (Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Paediatric Study Group), and the PCCRG (Paediatric Critical Care Research Group). She serves as World Health Organisation rapporteur for the clinical management of severe viral infections, is Chair of Paediatric Sepsis Advisory Network of the Australian Sepsis Network, and co-Chair of the globally recognized Queensland Paediatric Sepsis Program.
Assoc. Prof. Robyn Littlewood
Health & Wellbeing Queensland
Partner Investigator
Dr Robyn Littlewood is the Chief Executive Officer of Health and Wellbeing Queensland and a leading advocate for health promotion. Robyn believes every Queenslander has the right to better health and she is relentless in achieving this. An experienced leader, researcher, clinician, academic and educator, she has worked extensively across all levels of paediatric obesity prevention, nutrition and dietetics. Robyn has held influential roles including director at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, where she set up a dedicated obesity clinic, and the director of health services research at Children’s Health Queensland Hospital. She also previously co-chaired the Queensland Child and Youth Clinical Network and chaired the Paediatric Obesity Working Group, and led the first national paediatric dietetics training course in Australia, alongside the Dietitians Association of Australia.
Mr Rob Mackay
Aginic & Aginic Ventures
Partner Investigator
Rob Mackay is a business and technology consultant with over 10 years’ experience advising public and private sector customers on how to best leverage their data assets. Rob supports Aginic’s strategic partnerships and new service offerings, and also leads Aginic Ventures, which supports a portfolio of startups to rapidly transform from early stage ideas to successful market leading businesses.
Dr Li Kheng Chai
Health & Wellbeing Queensland
Partner Investigator
Dr Li Kheng Chai is a Dietitian, Research Fellow at Health and Wellbeing Queensland, and Honorary Fellow at University of Queensland. Dr Chai completed her PhD in Nutrition & Dietetics at the University of Newcastle and has experience in undergraduate teaching and supervision, health promotion, implementation science and health service research related to children’s health and obesity prevention and intervention. Her current research focuses on obesity prevention through system changes associated with nutrition and physical activity, and using technology to develop, deliver and evaluate health promotion programs to improve population health through prevention of obesity and chronic diseases.
Mr Nicholas Moss
Queensland Police Service
Partner Investigator
Nick Moss is the Manager, Data Services at the Queensland Police Service (QPS) and leads the QPS’s advanced data and analytics capability journey. Nick is a qualified statistician with a Bachelor of Science majoring in Statistical Computing and a Master of Applied Statistics. He’s been a faculty member of the School of Statistics at Macquarie University, before forming his own consultancy company aimed at providing information management consulting services to both Corporate and Government sectors. Since mid-2003, he has worked at the Department of Emergency Services, the Department of Community Safety, the Public Safety Business Agency and now at the QPS. He has over 35 years ICT experience.
Mr Neil Readshaw
Anonyome Labs
Partner Investigator
Neil is a recognised and awarded industry leader in security, privacy, and compliance. He is currently the Chief Security Officer of Anonyome Labs where he leads their security, risk, and compliance programs, and works with Sudo Platform partners to ensure compliance with their stringent security and data protection requirements. He previously led a global team as Chief Security Architect for IBM’s Managed Cloud Services. He has been granted over 30 patents worldwide for his inventions in security, privacy, and compliance.
Mr Brett Thebault
Aginic
Partner Investigator
Brett Thebault is a Director and Co-founderat Aginic, a specialist Business Intelligence consultancy based in Brisbane. Originally from the UK, he has a maths background and worked with a niche analytics company in London for 6 years prior to moving to Brisbane to set-up the Ernst & Young Analytics team in 2011. Brett and Marty Conneely then span-off Aginic in 2014 to focus on the rapid moving trends in BI in Queensland and across Australia. Brett specialises in using data to help improve performance and reduce costs for organisations and works across a broad range of industries including Health, Government and Commercial.
Assoc. Prof. Kristen Gibbons
Queensland Health
Partner Investigator
Kristen is a Senior EpidemiologistMater Research, and with the Child Health Research Centre, The University of Queensland.
Rhonda Nesbit
Astral Consulting
Partner Investigator
Rhonda has more than 15 years’ experience working with Astral Consulting to effectively deliver business outcomes to clients, including both the people and financial management of projects.
Affiliate Investigators
Dr Rocky Chen
The University of Queensland
Affiliate Investigator
Rocky Tong Chen is currently a Lecturer in Business Analytics with Data Science Group, School of ITEE, 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.
Dr Quan Nguyen
The University of Queensland
Affiliate Investigator
Dr Quan Nguyen is a Group Leader at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland. He is leading the Genomics and Machine Learning (GML) lab to study neuroinflammation and cancer-immune cells at single-cell resolution and within spatial morphological tissue context. His research interest is about revealing gene and cell regulators that determine the states of the complex cancer or neuronal ecosystem. Particularly, he is interested in quantifying cellular diversity and the dynamics of cell-cell interactions within the tissues to find ways to improve cancer diagnosis or cell-type specific treatments or the immunoinflammation responses that cause neuronal disease.
Assoc. Prof. Wojtek Tomaszewski
The University of Queensland
Affiliate Investigator
Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski is Deputy Director (Research) and a Research Group Leader at the Institute for Social Science Research at UQ, and Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre). He holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics, as well as an MA in Sociology from the University of Warsaw, Poland and a PhD in Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Wojtek joined UQ from the National Centre for Social Research in London and has specialist expertise in quantitative research methods and advanced statistical analysis. Wojtek has a strong research interest in the impact of disadvantage on educational and labour market outcomes in young people.
Dr Steve Petrie
Swinburne University of Technology
Affiliate Investigator
Dr Stephen (Steve) Petrie is a Data Scientist with experience in data analytics, neural networks, astrophysics, mathematical biology, image processing, computer vision, and evolutionary optimisation. He is an inter-disciplinary researcher who has collaborated with economists, biologists, computer scientists, physicists, clinicians, and government policy makers. Steve’s background is in physics; he has an MPhil in theoretical cosmology and a PhD in infectious disease modelling. His PhD involved modelling influenza infection dynamics within the respiratory tract, in order to assess the fitness of drug-resistant strains of influenza.
Dr Maciej Trzaskowski
UQ
Affiliate Investigator
Dr Trzaskowski is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the UQ Institute of Molecular Bioscience. He was the Head of Research at Max Kelsen until October 2022, and provided supervision to 10 researchers and machine learning engineers, as well as 3 PhD students and 2 postdocs. He also holds a position of a visiting scientist at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. He previously held the title of The British Academy Fellow aiming to improve utilisation of polygenic risk prediction in large population samples. He also underwent extensive training in application of a wide variety of Artificial Intelligence techniques extending beyond Machine Learning at the Department of Mathematics and Engineering, King’s College London as well as at University of Washington, Seattle. When in academia, he was a member of the Human Genome Organisation and a member of HUGO Trainee Committee, Behavioural Genetics Association, as well as an Associate Member and consultant for InLab quantitative and molecular genetics.
Dr Wen Hua
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Affiliate Investigator
Dr Wen Hua is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received her Bachelor’s and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Renmin University of China in 2010 and 2015 respectively. Before joining PolyU, she worked as a Senior Lecturer (tenured) and a Senior Research Fellow (awarded by the Australian Research Council) in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, and was a Chief Investigator with CIRES. She was awarded the Advance Queensland Early Career Research Fellowship (AQRF) in 2017 and the ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2021, two highly-competitive fellowships for early-career researchers. Her current research interests include information extraction and retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, spatiotemporal data management, high-performance query processing, and social media analytics. She has published 70+ papers in reputed journals and top international conferences in the fields of database and data mining, and has received recognition including the ICDE 2015 Best Paper Award, and the CIKM 2022 Best Paper Honourable Mention Award.
Operations Team
Kate Aldridge
The University of Queensland
Centre Manager
Kate is the CIRES Centre Manager and responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Centre. She joined the University of Queensland after 13 years at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where she was the Centre Manager for the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision and the QUT Centre for Robotics. Kate is passionate about creating welcoming and inclusive workplaces and dedicated to creating supportive research training environments.
Kathleen Williamson
The University of Queensland
Centre Coordinator
Kathleen is the CIRES Centre Coordinator assisting with events and communications as well as Centre operations. She was previously the Manager of the ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure, an ARC initiative, spanning 18 Australian universities and five private and government sector partners, to improve the quality, impact and visibility of Australian ICT research, through networking, collaboration and fostering research opportunities. Kathleen has extensive experience in event coordination from international summits, academic conferences to student focused engagement activities.
Strategy board
Geoff Clarke
Regional Standards Manager, Microsoft
Strategy Board Member
Geoff is the Regional Standards Manager of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific region, working with national standards bodies and leading industry associations across the region. He is committed to developing and maintaining positive, constructive relationships with government, academic and industry leaders, to collaboratively contribute to the development of standards globally. He is the chair and expert member of several IT and governance standards committees covering topics including Organisational Governance, Governance of IT, Cloud Computing, and Artificial Intelligence. Through these roles he provides guidance to organisations on developing information and technology strategies within a robust governance framework.
Stan Gallo
Partner, BDO Australia
Strategy Board Member
Stan is a Partner with the Forensic Services team at BDO in Brisbane and has over 30 years’ experience working as a Detective and senior leader in law enforcement and professional services. In his current role, he provides proactive risk management, investigative and technology advice to assist organisations in aligning Governance, Risk and Compliance programs with their strategic objectives. Stan works with clients across a range of industries and specialises in fraud, misconduct and compliance related matters, including the identification, preservation and analysis of digital evidence in cyber and technology related investigations.
Dr Sue Keay
Chair, Robotics Australia Group and Robotics Technology Lead, OZ Minerals
Strategy Board Member
Sue is the Chair, Robotics Australia Group and Robotics Technology Lead at OZ Minerals. She was the CEO of Queensland AI Hub following her role as Research Director for Cyber-Physical Systems at CSIRO’s Data61. She is responsible for bringing the Grace Hopper Celebration to Australia and led the development of Australia’s first Robotics roadmap, outlining how robotics and automation will impact on every sector of the Australian economy. Sue was formerly the Chief Operating Officer for the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, an ARC Centre of Excellence headquartered at QUT. She is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, chairs the Boards of Robotics Australia Group and the Australia AI Collective and is an Adjunct Professor at QUT.
James Mabbott
Partner in Charge, KPMG Innovate
Strategy Board Member
James is partner in charge for KPMG Futures and National Leader KPMG Innovate. James and his team work at the intersection of signals of change across society, technology, economics and politics to identify and understand emerging trends and their potential to reshape and reimagine our world. This is done by working at the CEO and Board level to identify opportunities for innovation and disruption to explore new business model hypotheses that drive profitable business growth with the aim of creating sustainable value for all stakeholders. He has worked across a range of public and private clients in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Technology, Energy and Natural Resources, and Government sectors.
Maria MacNamara
Director of Government Relations and Innovation Strategy, Kyndryl
Strategy Board Member
Maria is the Director of Government Relations and Innovation Strategy at Kyndryl and was the CEO and Co-Founder of Portal Consulting Pty Ltd. She has specialist expertise in policy, politics, professional services and digital transformation and has spent over 30 years working in the professional services sector leading marketing and business development teams, in politics as an adviser to the Hon. Arthur Sinodinos AO and in strategy and engagement at the state and federal government. Maria is an active participant in, and supporter of, the Australian innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem and is currently the convenor of the Australian Innovation Council, a board member of the Spark Festival, the Board of Advisors for Idea Spies, and the Advisory Council for the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police.
Dr Rachel Thomas
Founder + Researcher, fast.ai
Strategy Board Member
Rachel is the co-founder of fast.ai, a non-profit research lab studying how to make deep learning more accessible and widely applicable. She helped create the most popular free online course on deep learning, bringing more people around the world with diverse and non-traditional backgrounds into AI. She previously was founding director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco, with a focus on issues of surveillance, disinformation, bias, and justice in the tech industry. She was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI and is a popular writer and keynote speaker on topics of data ethics, AI accessibility, and bias in machine learning.
Data Governance Committee
Mr Neil Readshaw
Anonyome Labs
Chair
Neil is a recognised and awarded industry leader in security, privacy, and compliance. He is currently the Chief Security Officer of Anonyome Labs where he leads their security, risk, and compliance programs, and works with Sudo Platform partners to ensure compliance with their stringent security and data protection requirements. He previously led a global team as Chief Security Architect for IBM’s Managed Cloud Services. He has been granted over 30 patents worldwide for his inventions in security, privacy, and compliance.
Professor Marta Indulska
The University of Queensland
Research Director
Professor Marta Indulska is the CIRES Research Director and Leader of the Business Information Systems discipline at The University of Queensland Business School. Marta’s research interests include IT business value, data quality, business process management and open innovation, primarily focusing on using technology as an enabler of increased organisational effectiveness. She has worked with organisations in the retail, consulting and non-profit sectors to provide guidance on a variety of topics, including digital strategy, business process improvement, and emerging technologies and platforms for innovation.
Assoc. Prof. Gianluca Demartini
The University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Dr. Gianluca Demartini is an Associate Professor in Data Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. His main research interests include Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, and Human Computation. His research is currently funded by the Australian Research Council, Facebook, and Google. He received Best Paper awards at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) in 2018, at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in 2016 and 2020, and the Best Demo award at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2011. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications including papers at major venues such as WWW, ACM SIGIR, VLDBJ, ISWC, and ACM CHI. He is an ACM Senior Member, ACM Distinguished Speaker, TEDx speaker, and CIKM 2021 General co-chair.
Assoc. Prof. Amir Aryani
Swinburne University of Technology
Node Leader and Chief Investigator
Amir Aryani is the Head of the Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab in the Social Innovation Research Institute. The Lab applies contemporary and emerging co-op data analytics techniques to provide insight into health and social problems. Amir has experience with large-scale and cross-institution projects in Australia and Europe. His track records include collaboration with high-profile international institutions such as British Library, ORCID (U.S), Data Archiving and Network Analysis (DANS, Netherlands), Institution for the Social Sciences in Germany (GESIS), and funders including ARC, NHMRC, and NIH. He is an experienced project leader on initiatives involving creating and leading data-driven projects and using data modelling, information retrieval techniques, and real-time data analysis. He has published articles in high impact journals such as Nature Scientific Data, Metadata and Semantics Research, and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.
Kate Aldridge
University of Queensland
Centre Manager
Kate is the CIRES Centre Manager and responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Centre. She joined the University of Queensland after 13 years at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where she was the Centre Manager for the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision and the QUT Centre for Robotics. Kate is passionate about creating welcoming and inclusive workplaces and dedicated to creating supportive research training environments.
Professor Shazia Sadiq
The University of Queensland
Centre Director
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 focussed 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.
International expert panel
Professor Abraham Bernstein
University of Zurich
International Expert Panel Member
Professor Abraham Bernstein is a computer scientist with the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich, where he also runs the UZH Digital society Initiative — a university-wide research and teaching initiative about the digitalization with more than 170 faculty members. He is an expert on the Semantic Web, Machine Learning, AI, and Collective Intelligence, and his research work is based on both social science and technical foundations.
(Image credit: John Flury)
Professor Lei Chen
HKUST
International Expert Panel Member
Professor Lei Chen is a Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and became an IEEE Fellow in 2020 for his contributions to time series management and spatial crowdsourcing. His research interests include Data-Driven Machine Learning, Crowdsourcing-based Data Processing, and Web Data Management.
Distinguished Prof. Rayid Ghani
Carnegie Mellon University
International Expert Panel Member
Professor Rayid Ghani is a Distinguished Career Professor in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University. He works with governments and NGOs to help them tackle problems with AI and data science, developing methods and tools to do this effectively and ethically, to achieve equitable outcomes for all. He is passionate about teaching practical data science and started the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship that trains computer scientists, statisticians, and social scientists from around the world to work on data science problems with social impact.
Assoc. Adj. Prof. Michael Mahoney
University of California
International Expert Panel Member
Associate Adjunct Professor Michael Mahoney is based at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on algorithmic and statistical aspects of modern large-scale data analysis in scientific and Internet applications. His research interests include statistical computing, high dimensional data analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, with applications in the physical and environmental sciences, as well as social sciences.
Professor Felix Naumann
Hasso Plattner Institute
International Expert Panel Member
Professor Felix Naumann is the Chair for Information Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) at the University of Potsdam in Germany. His research interests include data profiling, data cleansing, and data integration with over 200 scientific publications.
Professor Sudha Ram
The University of Arizona
International Expert Panel Member
Sudha Ram is Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) at the University of Arizona. She is the director of the Advanced Database Research Group (ADRG) and co-director of INSITE: Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics. Her research is the areas of Enterprise Data Management, Business Intelligence, Large Scale Networks and Data Analytics. Her work uses different methods such as machine learning, statistical approaches, ontologies, and conceptual modelling.
Dr Divesh Srivastava
AT&T
International Expert Panel Member
Divesh Srivastava is the head of Database Research at AT&T. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Vice President of the VLDB Endowment, co-chair of the ACM Publications Board, and on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA). He has conducted research on a wide variety of topics in data management for over three decades. He has published over 350 technical articles in journals and peer reviewed conferences, has been cited over 32,000 times, has an h-index of 92, an i10-index of 336, and has over 100 US patents issued. He has served as the managing editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), as an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), as associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), and as the Chair or Co-chair of the Technical Program Committees of many international conferences including SIGMOD 2021, VLDB 2020 (Industrial), SIGMOD 2020 (Industrial), ICDE 2019 and CIKM 2018. He has presented keynotes at a large number of international conferences. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.
Dr Barbara Wixom
MIT
International Expert Panel Member
Barbara is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) which undertakes practical research on how firms generate business value from digitisation. Her work focuses on how organisations effectively deliver value from their information assets.
Professor Sean Xin Xu
Tsinghua University
International Expert Panel Member
Professor Sean Xin Xu is based at Tsinghua University Beijing, China. His research focuses on how to extract Information Technology’s business value and specialises in the two areas of digital enablement and IT governance.
Professor Xiaofang Zhou
HKUST
International Expert Panel Member
Prof. Xiaofang Zhou is Otto Poon Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1984 and 1987 respectively, and PhD in Computer Science from University of Queensland (UQ) in 1994. From 1994 to 1999, he worked as a Senior Research Scientist in Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, leading its Spatial Information Systems group. He joined University of Queensland in 1999 and became a Professor of Computer Science in 2004. From 2006 to 2020, he was Head of UQ Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) research group and Data Science discipline. His research focus is to find effective and efficient solutions for managing, integrating, and analysing large-scale complex data for business, scientific and personal applications. He has been working in the area of spatiotemporal and multimedia databases, data mining, data quality management, big data analytics, and machine learning. He received the Best Paper Awards at WISE 2012&2013, ICDE 2015&2019, DASFAA 2016 and ADC 2019. He was a Program Committee Chair of IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013), ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2016), and International Conference on Very Large Databases (PVLDB 2020). He was a General Chair of ACM Multimedia Conference (MM 2015). He was the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering from 2015-2018. Professor Zhou is a Fellow of IEEE.
Timos Sellis
Director, Archimedes Research Unit
International Expert Panel Member
Timos is the Director of the Archimedes Research Unit, part of the Athena Research Center in Athens, Greece. He was a Visiting Scientist at Facebook, Adjunct Professor and former Director of the Data Science Research Institute at Swinburne University of Technology. He is a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to database query optimisation, spatial data management and data warehousing. Timos has a significant international research reputation in big data, data analytics, data integration and spatio-temporal database systems. In 2018 he was awarded the IEEE TCDE Impact Award, in recognition of his impact in the field and for contributions to database systems research and broadening the reach of data engineering research.