Winner
Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award

Dr Shen’s thesis "Advances in Pathfinding Algorithms for Games, Route Planning Software, and Automated Warehouses" contributes to the traditional computer science field of pathfinding algorithms, with research from the thesis published in top-tier conferences. The thesis was examined by experts in the field who rate every aspect of the thesis as either excellent or exceptional. It is well written and makes clear significant contributions to the topic of pathfinding algorithms that are likely to deliver impact in applications such as robotics, gaming, and navigation.

Thesis link: https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/Advances_in_Pathfinding_Algorithms_for_Games_Route_Planning_Software_and_Automated_Warehouses/23938488 

Winner
Outstanding Research Contribution Award

Jia Wu has made impressive contributions to the areas of data mining and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on graph mining. Within the last four years, Jia has made significant advancements in graph mining theories and techniques, notably designing a subgraph neural network for brain disorder exploration and enhancing graph neural network interpretability through a deep evolutionary framework. His contributions across graph learning paradigms are widely adopted as field baselines. Jia's research extends beyond academia through collaborations with leading Australian industries, including CSIRO and Domain Holdings. As Research Director of the Applied AI Centre, Macquarie University, he has secured nearly $10 million in funding since 2021, showcasing his leadership and societal impact.

Corrected 25 Nov 2024

Winner
Distinguished Service Award

Alan Fekete’s breadth of contribution and success in academia is enormous. Notably, he was named a Distinguished Scientist by the ACM "in recognition of significant accomplishments in, and impact on, the computing field.”  His leadership in the development of the field of IT in Australia is outstanding. I list two significant contributions here. Alan has helped to build and strengthen the Australasian IT community through his role in leading national conferences across multiple subdisciplines, even some outside his own research domain. In 2018-19 Alan led the extensive consultation across the community to propose changes to the Field of Research (FoR) codes.  Alan's public contributions to the IT community include being on the CORE exec, chairing the CORE Dissertation award committee, and supporting and contributing to journal and conference rankings. 

Professor John Gough is one of the most important figures in the early development of Computer Science in Queensland and was a leading figure in the Australian Computer Science community over many years.  He is particularly recognised for his eminence as a researcher in compiler and software technology.   He conducted research on programming language implementation, including theoretical work on language translation and code generation. His compilers for programming languages, particularly those for the Pascal-family, were well known throughout the world, and have been used by many tens of thousands of programmers.  John was foundation Head of School within the Faculty of Information Technology at QUT and later served as Dean of the Faculty from 1996-2004. The Programming Languages (later Programming Languages and Systems) Research Group led by Professor Gough had a profound influence on the careers of students and colleagues over more than 15 years.

Professor Anton van den Hengel is the Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) and Director of the Centre for Augmented Reasoning. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the

University of Adelaide, a Chief Investigator of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Healthy

Housing, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal

Society of South Australia. The Centre for Augmented Reasoning (CAR), established in 2021, represents a $20m investment by the Australian Government in AI research. Professor van den Hengel was also the founder of AIML, Australia’s largest machine learning research group. Professor van den Hengel has been a CI on over $80m in research funding from sources, including Google, Facebook,

Canon, BHP Billiton, and the ARC. Anton was a Director of Applied Science within Amazon for four

years where he formed the Australian arm of Amazon’s International Machine Learning group.

Professor van den Hengel has won several awards, including the 2021 Australasian AI Outstanding Service Award, the Pearcey Foundation Entrepreneur Award, the SA Science Excellence Award for Research Collaboration, and the CVPR Best Paper prize in 2010. According to Google Scholar, he has authored over 400 publications, has over 34,000 citations and an h-index of 84. He has had 8 patents commercialised, formed 5 start-ups, and had a medical technology achieve first-in-class FDA approval. Current research interests include vision and language problems, image-based modelling, and

semantic reconstruction.

Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE is a professor of computer science at the University of Queensland. As a researcher and educator in data and process management, her work has focused on dismantling socio-technical barriers to technology-driven transformation. As director of the ARC Industry Transformation Training Centre for Information Resilience, she has helped link research and industry through industry-informed PhD training programs.  Shazia actively engages in policy advice and science advocacy activities, including the development of national strategic plans and expert submissions to government initiatives on emerging digital technologies, and was a core author on the government’s  Rapid Response Information Report (2023) on Generative AI. She is also a champion for equity and diversity through her work with the first Australian ACM-W student chapter and DEI@DB, an international group that leads diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for the database community.  Shazia is the past Chair of the National Committee on Information and Communication Sciences at the Australian Academy of Science 2019-2022, is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and member of The Australian Research Council College of Experts 2018-2021. 

Professor Geoff Webb is a professor at Monash University. He has contributed many impactful algorithms and methods to the fields of artificial intelligence, data science, bioinformatics and computational biology, including minimum support and confidence techniques, multi-strategy ensemble learning and the use of black-box machine learning to make predictions about users.  Many of his AI technologies have been released as open-source software and are widely used in industry and research.  Geoff has a sustained track record of exceptional leadership and as a technical advisor to start ups, mentor and advisor to staff and students at all levels.  His contributions have  won many awards including the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science 2017 and  ARC Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award 2014.