2023 Award Citations

CORE Outstanding Research award

Lina Yao, University of New South Wales

Lina Yao has made substantial research contributions towards learning contextualised actionable intelligence from sparse, diverse and dynamic multi-source data through developing innovative and effective methodologies and algorithms. Her research has laid a foundation that enables advanced personalised and trustworthy AI-powered human-data cooperation. 

CORE Distinguished Dissertation Award
Winner

Yannan Li, University of Wollongong

Dr Li’s research concerns the design of blockchain-based secure applications. Both examiners recommended her thesis be awarded with special commendation and she was awarded a best thesis award from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Science at the University of Wollongong. Her research addressed four key aspects of blockchain applications: regulation in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based decentralised e-voting, contractual equivocation in blockchain and privacy protection in stateless blockchain. All the protocols were implemented, and the performance was demonstrated to show the practicality of the techniques. During her PhD, Dr Li published over ten papers in prestigious conferences and journals.

CORE Distinguished Dissertation Award Commendation

Ben Volmer, University of South Australia

Dr Volmer’s research investigates the use of predictive cues in an augmented reality (AR) setting. Both examiners were impressed with the depth of work explored through a series of experiments, and found the research compelling. His thesis expands upon the existing knowledge of AR research by investigating how AR instructions, designated cues, can enhance AR procedural tasks. These cues were thoroughly evaluated through different scenarios, including a sleep deprivation study. The effectiveness was measured using cognitive psychology and neuroscience methodologies. The work will form the foundation for many future studies in this area.

CORE Distinguished Dissertation Award Commendation

Nitika Mathur, University of Melbourne

Dr Mathur’s research investigates evaluation in machine translation: how best to evaluate the automated translation of one natural language to another. Both referees found her thesis to be innovative and important, and to be a delight to read. Her work addresses improving the efficiency of human evaluation, developing new automatic metrics, and improving the evaluation of automatic metrics to aid in metric selection and analysis of metric outputs: all these problems are fundamental to the field. Dr Mathur’s research is making a substantial contribution to knowledge and a substantial impact in the field. Her research has been adopted by the annual Conference on Machine Translation evaluation competition.

CORE Teaching Award

Chris McDonald, University of Western Australia

Awarded for Chris' outstanding contribution to teaching and his drive to arouse students’ curiosity, interest, creative endeavour and enthusiasm for computing.

Chris McDonald has taught in and undertakes research in the technical computing areas of computing systems, networking, security, software development, and programming languages for 32 years. His level 2-4 units introduce students to many fundamental technical aspects of computing, by providing both their historical context and contemporary examples of their application. Chris McDonald addresses the challenge of weaving together the old and the new by drawing on his own computing experiences, keeping abreast of new, often overnight, developments in computing, and discussing these with his students in highly interactive class sessions and online fora, and incorporating them in students' assessment.

CORE Service Award

Gillian Dobbie, University of Auckland

Gill’s career has included a range of service and leadership roles in computing nationally, in the region and beyond. These contributions range from work with professional bodies and funding agencies, complemented by her leadership in growing the disciplines of computer science and software engineering within the University of Auckland, and through her own internationally renowned research in data management and data stream mining. Gill has served on the CORE Executive twice, from 2009-2010 and from 2015-2019, the latter in the role of Treasurer. In New Zealand Gill has been a member of the IT Professionals’ Degree Accreditation Board, and until recently she chaired the Marsden Fund’s Mathematical and Information Sciences panel (since 2016) and was Deputy Chair of the Marsden Funding Council from 2018. Gill has been a strong advocate and role model for there being greater diversity in computing, including a recent role as Diversity, Inclusion and Equity co-chair for the VLDB 2022 conference, as well as more generally, as Chair of the New Zealand Women in Leadership programme from 2016-2019.