CORE News 2024 

Update: ACSW Brisbane February 2025

Planning for ACSW 2025 in Brisbane is well underway.  ACSW 2025 will be co-hosted by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) and the Australian Council of Deans of ICT (ACDICT).   See the ACSW website for the latest news  https://acsw.core.edu.au/
The conference will run during the week of10 to 14 of February 2025, hosted by the University of Queensland.  ACSW activities include the CORE AGM, annual HoDs and Profs meeting, invited talks by the winners of the CORE awards, and a panel session on advocating for the discipline of Computer Science.  ACSW will also host the Australian Computing Education Conference (ACE), AusPDC and the AISC 2025 conference

Published: 31 October 2024

CORE Awards 2025

I am delighted to announce the winners of the CORE awards for 2025.  Congratulations to Bojie Shen, Jia Wu, Alan Fekete, Nicole Herbert, Shaanan Cohney, Olya Ohrimenko and Minjing Dong.  The awards will be presented formally at ACSW 2025 in Brisbane and the winners will give keynote talks at the conference.  Thank you to the members of the award selection panels for their excellent work in assessing the applications for these awards. The award citations are also available online at https://www.core.edu.au/awards  
Rachel Cardell-Oliver, CORE president
Published: 31 October 2024

Bojie Shen 

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 

Jia Wu

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

Alan Fekete

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. 

Nicole Herbert

Winner
CORE Teaching Award

A/Prof Nicole Herbert for her exceptional contributions to authentic, industry-focused curriculum development. Her strong commitment to creating inclusive and culturally aware programs ensures the preparation of outstanding computing professionals for Australia’s future. For example, A/Prof Herbert adopted an Action Research approach to embed Aboriginal content into the curricula balancing ICT content with Indigenous perspectives, transforming her curriculum and leading other discipline teams to Indigenise their curriculum as well. Her commitment to student outcomes has led to redesigned a Masters program to address low student satisfaction and poor employment outcomes by integrating Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) and authentic assessment approaches increasing student satisfaction and graduate employment outcomes. She has further established WIL opportunities for final year ICT students leading to students winning industry awards on their projects. Her curriculum reform and teaching and learning initiatives has been widely published and cited leading to impact across the discipline sector.

Shaanan Cohney

Winner
CORE Teaching Award Early Career

Dr Shaanan Cohney for an outstanding trajectory in curriculum design with an extensive focus on motivating students and addressing the critical issue of student engagement. His implementation of new initiatives has led to high impact which is impressive for an early career academic with limited time to show impact of his teaching. For his example, his passion for student motivation has led to initiating active learning through engaging students with stage props and exercises on the lecture theatre stage illustrating computer science concepts. His commitment to student learning has led to establishing the First Year Center, a dedicated drop-in space to build a cohort of students and offer support. Other examples of Dr Cohney’s dedication to student learning include incorporating flipped learning with high quality videos, introducing weekly problem sheets to scaffold learning building on real-world tasks, and collaborated on developing an automatic feedback tool to provide more feedback to students without the need for additional tutors.

Olya Ohrimenko

Commendation
Outstanding Research Contribution Award
Olya Ohrimenko has made major contributions to the fields of privacy and security. Her research on attacks has uncovered vulnerabilities in Google and Meta open-source libraries. Recognising her expertise, Olya served on the Methodology Advisory Committee of the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2021. She has been a finalist for the APAC Women in AI Awards in the Cybersecurity category for two consecutive years (2023 & 2024) and has secured substantial funding from Meta, Oracle, and the Australian Department of Defence ($9.59 million since 2020), demonstrating her excellence in both academia and industry. 

Minjing Dong

Commendation
Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award

Dr Minjing Dong is awarded a commendation for his thesis "Boosting Adversarial Robustness via Neural Architecture Search and Design". Minjing's thesis tackles the emerging problem of improving vulnerabilities in deep neural networks, and makes several novel contributions to this area. The thesis is well written and there are numerous strong publications associated with its contributions.

Thesis link:

https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/32060



CORE Newsletter Changes

I am experimenting with a new format for the CORE news. News items added here as they arise (with a publication date) rather than in a quarterly digest.  Let me know how you find the new format.  Suggestions of items for CORE news or any other matters about the CORE web site can be emailed to admin@core.edu.au or the president rachel.cardell-oliver@uwa.edu.au

Rachel Cardell-Oliver
CORE President

Published: 24 September 2024

CORE Academy 2025

The CORE Academy is established to honour and recognise individuals who have made significant and cumulative contributions to the development of the computing disciplines in Australasia.   I am delighted to announce the election of five CORE academy members for 2025.

Their citations are also available online at https://www.core.edu.au/the-core-academy
24 September 2024

John Gough

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.

Published: 24 September 2024

Anton van den Hengel

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.

Published: 24 September 2024.
Updated 25 October 2024

Shazia Sadiq

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. 

Published: 24 September 2024

Geoff Web

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.

Published: 24 September 2024

Justin Zobel

Professor Justin Zobel is a professor at the University of Melbourne.  His research contributions are notable for their significance and for being in multiple fields: information retrieval, string algorithms, research methods, and bioinformatics. He is the author of three highly regarded textbooks on writing and research study. Writing for Computer Science has been widely adopted as a text at graduate and senior undergraduate level and is generally regarded as the best of its kind in the field, with sales in the hundreds of thousands. He has led key initiatives for Indigenous education including the successful National Indigenous Engineering Summit in 2015.  He has used his University leadership positions as Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of School to promote the discipline of Computer Science, promote quality, and pursue social goals. He has also pursued quality through his textbooks, which are designed to improve research standards and enable stronger research training.
Published: 24 September 2024

Science and Technology Australia

On 20 September I attended STA's annual leadership dialogue on STA's lobbying priorities for the next Australian election.  The overall theme is for an "Australia made from Australian Ideas" to be achieved by putting STEM front and centre for Australia's prosperity and target to boost Australian R&D spending to 3% of GDP by 2035.  Current R&D investment is just 1.68% of GDP - a long way below the 2.7% average of our global competitors.  

STA's pitch is that: “STEM skills and ideas will create future jobs and prosperity, but we must give businesses, education, and the wider sector the tools to do this. On behalf of our member organisations and the STEM professionals they represent, we’ll be looking for politicians at the upcoming Federal election to commit to a future powered by innovation.”
https://scienceandtechnologyaustralia.org.au/a-comprehensive-plan-to-build-a-better-future-science-leaders/ 

I will shortly (Nov 2024) be calling for nominations from CORE members to attend STA's Science Meets Parliament 2025.  CORE funds apx 2 scholarships for attendance at Science Meets Parliament.  You can read reports from past CORE attendees here https://www.core.edu.au/science-meets-parliament-reports and more information about Science Meets Parliament for 2025 here https://scienceandtechnologyaustralia.org.au/science-meets-parliament-2025/ 


Rachel Cardell-Oliver, CORE president, Published: 24 September 2024

ACSW Brisbane February 2025

The conference will run during the week 10 to 14 of February 2025, hosted by the University of Queensland.  ACSW activities include the CORE AGM, annual HoDs and Profs meeting, invited talks by the winners of the CORE awards, and the Australian Computing Education Conference (ACE).  We would like to host meetings of research clusters and communities of practice.  Please contact David Abramson if you have a group meeting that could piggyback on the ACSW organisation.


Published: 24 September 2024

ICORE Rankings

As was reported at the AGM and in rankings emails, the CORE conference rankings has now become an international collaboration with Italy and Spain's peak computing bodies. It has been renamed to ICORE conference rankings and there are 3 members from Spain and Italy now on the Rankings management committee.

The ICORE committee is now actively working with the software programming team (led by Young Lee from Macquarie), on having a new ranking submission round in 2025, with the next rankings to be published in early 2026. Non-Australasian colleagues can sign up to the rankings@core.edu.au google group to be informed of developments and deadlines. Information will also go out through the CORE member list.

Published: July 2024

Australian National AI Committee Awards

The Australian National AI Committee is calling for the following three awards which will be announced at Australasian AI 2024, Melbourne, 25 - 29 November 2024 (onsite) https://ajcai2024.org/.  

(1) The Australasian Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Research Contribution Award 

The Australasian-AI Distinguished Research Contributions Award is given to an individual or a group with influential research contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence.  The award holder(s) should be resident(s) of Australasia at the time of nomination.   

Each nomination should consist of a maximum of 1 page making the case for the award covering the relevance and broader impacts of the research undertaken by the individual or group.
Evidence can be drawn using citations, practical impact, or by other means that can be verified independently by the committee.    

(2) The Australasian-AI Outstanding Service Award  

The Australasian-AI Outstanding Service Award is given to an individual or a group with major service contributions that have promoted and served the Australasian AI community. The award holder(s) should be resident(s) of Australasia at the time of nomination. 

Each nomination should include a maximum of 1 page making the case for the award covering the impact of the activities by the nominee and their roles in promoting Australasian AI research.    

(3) The Australasian-AI Emerging Researcher Award

The Australasian-AI Emerging Researcher Award is given to an individual who has been awarded PhD title within 5 years and has achieved significant research contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence.  The award holder(s) should be resident(s) of Australasia at the time of nomination. 

Each nomination should include the following pieces of information:  

(a) up to 3 significant publications in Artificial Intelligence 

(b) A maximum of 1 page making the case for the award covering the relevance and broader impacts of these publications.    

* IMPORTANT: The nominator should elicit the consent of the nominee before a nomination is forwarded to the Award Committee Chair before the closing date for nominations.  

Nominations should be sent to the Award Committee Chair Professor Toby Walsh as early as possible: tw@cse.unsw.edu.au by 15 September 2024

The award will be presented in the form of a certificate and reimbursement of reasonable costs to support the award winner to attend the AI conference.  Determination of reasonable costs will be at the discretion of the Australasian AI National Committee Chair. 

Prof. Toby Walsh FAA FACM FRSN
Chief Scientist       | Laureate Fellow & Scientia Professor of AI

UNSW's AI Institute | School of CSE, UNSW Sydney | CSIRO Data61

Published: July 2024 

Vale Emeritus Professor Dagan (David) Feng

It is with great sadness we report that University of Sydney Emeritus Professor Dagan (David) Feng died peacefully on the 4th of May 2024

 

David started at the University of Sydney in 1988 and became a professor in 1999/2000. Besides his research leadership in building the Biomedical Multimedia Information Technology (BMIT) research group and his own significant research contributions over a 35-year period, he was an inspirational leader, mentor, and administrator who served as HoS at a difficult time for the School (then known as the Basser Dept. of CS).  He was appointed HoS in 2000 with a mandate to turn the School around. During that time, he was the major force of the rejuvenation of Computer Science in Sydney.  His emphasis on consideration and inclusion, as well as academic values, made Computer Science a great place to work and to study. He successfully lobbied the then VC and senior management for significant funding boost which was invested not only in hiring a number of senior and junior academics but also in a major facelift to the School's facilities on the lower floor of the Madsen Building.  He was also instrumental in getting our current building built (2005-07) at a time when such approvals were very difficult.  He served a second term as HoS starting in 2012.

 

He had a number of honorary positions, including at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Shanghai JiaoTong University, Northwestern Polytechnic University, Northeastern University and Tsinghua University, and he published more than 1000 papers during his long career. Professor Feng was a Fellow of ACS, HKIE, IET, IEEE, and Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

 

David called the University of Sydney his ‘home’ for the last 35 years, and he took great pride in his work and contributions to the university.

He was very encouraging and supportive to me and many of our colleagues. We will miss him.

DR JOACHIM GUDMUNDSSON | Professor and Head of School

School of Computer Science | Faculty of Engineering | The University of Sydney

Image source: saiconference.com/IntelliSys


Published: July 2024