Project Leaders

Albert Ardevol Grau

Dr. Albert Ardevol is team leader in the Protein and Molecular Modelling team, in the Manufacturing BU. He is interested in in protein modelling, computational enzymology, and design of bioactive molecules. In his research, he uses physics- and AI-based methods to create new enzymes for biotechnological applications, model therapeutic proteins and support projects of drug design with hit identification and lead optimization technologies.
He is convinced that only an integrative dialog of AI applications with human interpretation can help us understand complex biological problems and set the environment for new creative solutions to emerge. He is applying this to the cornerstone of biological research: structural biology.

Dr. Mohan Baruwal Chhetri is a Senior Research Scientist with the Distributed Systems Security Group at CSIRO Data61. He holds a Master of Information Technology (MIT) and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Monash University and Swinburne University of Technology respectively. His main research interest is in developing intelligent solutions to facilitate decision support, decision automation and decision optimization in cyber-physical-social ecosystems. Prior to joining Data61, he was a lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Pascal's research interests centre around the development of automated technology for environmental monitoring across Microbial Genomics, PCR, Genetic barcoding. Advances in genomic science and molecular biology offer many powerful tools for understanding the environment. Unfortunately, most of these methods require significant training and hardware which limits their ability to be used in the field or deployed remotely. Pascal's work relates to the miniaturisation and automation of environmental monitoring tools to facilitate remote monitoring and high temporal and spatial resolution studies.

Andreas is interested in the convergence of psychology and emerging technology systems to develop a deeper understanding of human behaviour and cognition in a technology context and to drive innovation and adoption.
Andreas’ work focuses on:
• Human Factors research with new interactive technologies
• Understanding and developing models of human trust and cognitive workload when interacting with (semi)automated systems, decision support and ML/AI systems
• Novel evaluation and assessment methods of human behaviour and cognitive processes

Aidan is currently System Scientist for the ASKAP radio telescope array, Australia's latest national radio observatory facility. He has a long-standing interest in experimental science, instrument development and space research. Aidan has contributed to the design, construction, commissioning, and operations of several radio astronomy instruments, with the goal of using the latest technology to improve our understanding of the universe. Advanced software and high-volume data processing are key to this endeavour, and the emerging field of collaborative intelligence will maximise the discovery potential of ASKAP and future observatories.

Dr Claire Mason leads the Technology and Work team in CSIRO’s Data61. The team use Artificial Intelligence to derive insights from big datasets regarding the way in which new technologies are affecting demand for workers and skills. Working within the Collaborative Intelligence Future Science Platform, Claire and her colleagues also explore what skills workers will need to optimise the benefits of collaborative AI tools. Claire’s research is widely published in both peer reviewed journals and mainstream media outlets.

Vanessa is a radio astronomer working in CSIRO Space & Astronomy. She is the Head of Science Operations for the ASKAP radio telescope, managing astronomical observations from specification to the arrival of the data at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Vanessa has extensive expertise and interest in big data analysis/visualisation, automation of complex systems, and the evolving role of the human expert in these increasingly autonomous systems. She also leads 'The Future of Meetings' community of practice to explore and disseminate new approaches to distributed collaboration by leveraging emerging and intelligent technologies.

Pavan is currently a Senior Research Scientist in the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Group at CSIRO's DATA61 Business unit. Pavan obtained his PhD in Robotics from the University of Alberta, Canada. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the ANU before commencing with CSIRO in 1998 as a Robotics Software Engineer. He was originally involved with several foundational projects for the Robotics Group in the Mining Domain. In the past, he has been a team leader for the Software team as well several teams in RAS. Pavan is currently working on dynamic situational awareness, applied and demonstrated on CSIRO’s DARPA human-robot team to create robots that can morphologically adapt to their tasks and environments.

Rad studied Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK where he also completed his PhD on graph-theoretical structures for biology. He then joined the University of Adelaide where he developed high-performance computational pipelines and web applications for integration, analysis, and visualisation of biological data. He continues this work as a Research Scientist in Crops Datascience group at CSIRO’s Agriculture & Food Business Unit where he also develops frameworks and software to drive reproducibility and automation in crop informatics and datascience. Rad is working on the development of human-machine collaborative workflows for efficient and accurate annotation of genomes.

Pete is currently the Group Leader for Digitisation with CSIRO’s National Collection and Marine Infrastructure business unit. His long-term research interests focus on the ecological and coevolutionary dynamics of natural host-microbe interactions using theoretical and spatially explicit computer modelling, experimental and field studies and molecular approaches. While much of Pete’s career has centred on the population and metapopulation dynamics of plant-pathogen systems, he has also worked extensively on the ecological associations between native legumes and associated nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria (rhizobia). Such interactions provide an opportunity to address fundamental questions in community ecology, including the evolution of host specificity, shifts along the mutualism-parasitism continuum, impacts of plant-soil feedbacks on community structure, and geographic-scale patterns in soil diversity and symbiotic effectiveness. Pete will be working on identifying which types of activities could a digital curator provide substantial assistance to human collection staff. This includes explicit identification of tasks where machine-human interaction and collaboration is a critical element.