2018 Speakers

John O'Driscoll

John O’Driscoll

Department of Premier and Cabinet

John O’Driscoll recently accepted the new role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in the Department of Premier & Cabinet in October 2017. His responsibilities include enhancing cyber security capability and resilience in Victoria, and delivering actions detailed in the recently released Victorian Government Cyber Security Strategy. John has over 35 years experience in cyber security and IT governance within financial services and the public sector. He and his wife Margaret moved to Melbourne from Sydney in 2011 to take on a role in IT risk management with ANZ Bank. He is on the Board of the Melbourne Chapter of ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association), and is a regular guest lecturer on IT Security and Risk Management at a number of universities. He enjoys sport and has a passion for flying.


Dr Partha Pal RmailDr Partha Pal

BBN Technologies, USA

Dr Partha Pal is a Principal Scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies (BBN) and leads the Distributed Systems Technologies (DST) research group at BBN. DST researchers are developing enabling technologies to make distributed systems of various kinds- ranging from enterprise to tactical, cyber-physical to biological, and cloud-scale to swarms – adaptive, autonomous, intelligent and resilient. He has been one of the early proponents of adaptive cyber security, and survivable and resilient systems. He has been the PI and PM on numerous advanced technology R&D projects sponsored by DARPA, AFRL, DHS and IARPA. Most recently he served as the PI of BBN’s Advanced Adaptive Applications Environment (A3) effort under the DARPA CRASH program that developed a near-application mediation-based adaptive technology that makes network-facing server applications resilient against zero-day attacks. He is currently leading a project that is developing adaptive network maneuvers, including deceptive maneuvers to counter extreme DDoS attacks. He also oversees a number of other projects including one that is developing technology to adapt software in response to ecosystem changes and another that is using continuous monitoring and runtime verification to determine trustworthiness of a sUAS (small unmanned aircraft system) in operation. Dr Pal earned his PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ and has over 90 peer reviewed publications. He has served in the program committees and review panels for multiple conferences, workshops and journals. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.


Photo of Prof John GrundyProf John Grundy 

 Deakin University

John Grundy is Pro Vice-Chancellor ICT Innovation and Translation, Alfred Deakin Professor and Professor of Software Engineering at Deakin University. Previously John was Dean of the School of Software and Electrical Engineering and also Director of the Swinburne University Centre for Computing and Engineering Software Systems (SUCCESS). Prior to Swinburne he was Head of Department for Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His teaching is mostly in the area of team projects, software requirements and design, software processes, distributed systems, and programming. His research areas include software tools and techniques, software architecture, model-driven software engineering, visual languages, software security engineering, service-based and component-based systems and user interfaces. He has published nearly 350 refereed papers, won over $22m in government and industry research grants, and supervised over 60 PhD and Masters by Research students. He has R&D collaboration with a range of companies which have included, among many others, Uniting Agewell, Sanitarium, Unisono, Mailguard, Thales Australia, CA Labs, DST Group, VicRoads, XSol, Orion Health, Peace Software, and Whitecloud Systems. He is a Fellow of Engineers Australia and Fellow of Automated Software Engineering. He is currently on the ARC College of Experts and was on the ERA 2012 assessment panel.


Vijay VaradharajanProf Vijay Varadharajan

 University of Newcastle

Vijay Varadharajan is Global Innovation Chair Professor in Cyber Security at the University of Newcastle since March 2017. He is also the Director of Advanced Cyber Security Engineering Research Centre (ACSRC) at Newcastle. Previously he was Microsoft Chair Professor in Innovation in Computing at Macquarie University (2001 till March 2017). Before this he was Dean/Head of School of Computing and IT at University of Western Sydney (1996-2000). Previously, Vijay has headed worldwide Security Research at HP Labs based European Headquarters at Bristol, UK (1988-1995). During his tenure at HP Labs, under his leadership, some six different security technologies were transferred into successful HP products in Divisions, generating over billions of dollars. He also headed the Technical Security Strategy Initiative at HP under the Senior Vice President, USA. Before this, he was a Research Manager at British Telecom Research Labs. U.K (1987-88). During 1985-1986, first he was Research Fellow and then Lecturer in Computer Science at Plymouth and Reading Universities. He did his PhD in Computer and Communication Security in the U.K (1981-1984) from Plymouth and Exeter Universities in U.K., sponsored by BT Research Labs. He did his Electronic Engineering degree from Sussex University, UK (1978-1981). He was awarded the 1981 Prize of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, IEE, for outstanding performance at Sussex University as well as the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals Award (UK).


Dr June Andronick

A/Prof June Andronick

Data61/UNSW 

June Andronick is Principal Researcher at Data61|CSIRO (formerly NICTA), and conjoint Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is leading the Trustworthy Systems group, world-leading in the area of verified operating systems software. The group is known worldwide for the formal verification of the seL4 operating system microkernel. June’s current research interest focuses on concurrency reasoning for operating system code, where she leads the formal verification of a multicore version of seL4. June was recognised in 2011 by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the world’s top young innovators (TR35). She also received, together with her team, the MIT TR10 award for the top ten emerging technologies in the world. Previously, June worked in industry for the smart-card manufacturer Gemalto in Formal Methods research, where she did my PhD in collaboration with University of Paris Sud.


Prof Sanjay JhaProf Sanjay Jha

University of New South Wales

Professor Sanjay K. Jha is Director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Laboratory (Cyspri) at UNSW. He also heads the Network Systems and Security Group (NetSys) at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. His research activities cover a wide range of topics in networking including Network and Systems Security, Wireless Sensor Networks, Adhoc/Community wireless networks, Resilience and Multicasting in IP Networks. Sanjay has published over 200 articles in high quality journals and conferences and graduated  25 PhD students. He is the principal author of the book Engineering Internet QoS and a co-editor of the book Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems Perspective. He is an editor of the IEEE Trans. of Secure and Dependable Computing (TDSC) and served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) and the ACM Computer Communication Review (CCR).


Prof N Asokan

Aalto University, Finland

N. Asokan is a professor at Aalto University, Finland where he co-leads the Secure Systems group. Prior to joining academia, he spent over 15 years in industrial research with Nokia and IBM. His research interests center on understanding how to build systems that are simultaneously secure, easy to use and inexpensive to deploy. Asokan directs the Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security (https://haic.aalto.fi/) and is the lead academic PI for Intel Collaborative Research Institute for ICRI-CARS in Finland (http://www.icri-cars.org/). He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He received his education at the University of Waterloo, Syracuse University and IIT Kharagpur. More information on Asokan’s work is available at his website https://asokan.org/asokan/


Prof Xun Yi

RMIT University

Xun Yi is currently a Professor with the Computer Science and Software Engineering, School of Science, RMIT University, Australia. His research interests include applied cryptography, computer and network security, mobile and wireless communication security, and data privacy protection. He has published more than 160 research papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He has ever undertaken program committee members for more than 30 international conferences. Recently, he has led some Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects in data privacy protection. Since 2014, he has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Computing.


Prof Willy Susilo

University of Wollongong

Willy Susilo received a PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Wollongong, Australia. He is a Professor and the Head of School of Computing and Information Technology and the director of Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology (iC2) at the University of Wollongong. He was previously awarded the prestigious ARC Future Fellow by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Researcher of the Year award in 2016 by the University of Wollongong. His main research interests include cybersecurity, cryptography and information security. His work has been cited more than 10,000 times in Google Scholar. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Information journal. He has served as a program committee member in dozens of international conferences. He is currently serving as an Associate Editors in several international journals, including Elsevier Computer Standards and Interface and International Journal of Information Security (IJIS, Springer). He has published more than 350 research papers in the area of cybersecurity and cryptology. He is a senior member of IEEE.


Xavier BoyenProf Xavier Boyen

ARC Future Fellow, Queensland University of Technology

Xavier Boyen is an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of information security at QUT, which he joined after a decade of hands-on experience in cybersecurity in the private sector. He is passionate about cryptography as an enabler of human freedom. His scientific contributions include research papers with over 10,000 citations, IEEE and IETF standards, patents, and cryptographic systems with real-world impact. Xavier has a PhD from Stanford.


Prod Jean CampProf Jean Camp

Indiana University, USA

Jean Camp is a Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School where her courses were also listed in Harvard Law, Harvard Business, and the Engineering Systems Division of MIT. She spent the year after earning her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station and with a MSEE at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on the intersection of human and technical trust, levering economic models and human-centered design to create safe, secure systems.


Bruce SchneierDr Bruce Schneier

Security Technologist, USA

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by the Economist. He is the author of 14 books including the New York Times best-seller Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and Verified Voting.org. He is also a special advisor to IBM Security and the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Resilient.


Mike JohnstoneA/Prof Mike Johnstone

Edith Cowan University

Mike is an Associate Professor at the School of Science at Edith Cowan University where he teaches secure programming and advanced software engineering.  As a senior member of the Security Research Institute at ECU his work on resilient systems covers secure development methodologies, wireless sensor networks and the security of IoT devices with a focus on critical infrastructure. He provides consultancy services in cyber security for private industry, government and research organisations and has held various IT roles including programmer, systems analyst, project manager and network manager before moving to academia.


Prasant Mohapatra

Prof Prasant Mohapatra

University of California, Davis, USA

Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and serves as the Dean and Vice-Provost of Graduate at the University of California, Davis. He is a former Endowed Chair of the Department of Computer Science. In the past, he has held Visiting Professor positions at AT&T, Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA), University of Padova, Italy, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Yonsei University, South Korea. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM WINET, and Ad Hoc Networks. He has been on the program/organizational committees of several international conferences. Dr. Mohapatra is the recipient of an Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award from Penn State University, an Outstanding Research Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of California, and the HP Labs Innovation Research Award winner for three years. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and AAAS. Dr. Mohapatra’s research interests are in the areas of wireless networks, mobile communications, sensor networks, and Internet protocols.


Carsten Rudolph A/Prof Carsten Rudolph

Monash University

Carsten Rudolph is an associate professor in the Faculty of IT at Monash University and Director of the Oceania Cyber Security Centre in Melbourne, Australia. His research concentrates on information security, formal methods, security engineering and cryptographic protocols with a strong focus on hardware-based security and Trusted Computing. Results of his research work have been applied in areas such as critical infrastructures, industry control systems, or certified systems. Among other activities he has worked on a security validation of the Trusted Platform Module TPM 1.2 on behalf of the German BSI and he contributes as invited expert to the standardisation of the TPM in the Trusted Computing Group TCG. He successfully initiated five large co-operative European research projects funded by the European Commission along with six projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF. His industry co-operations included large companies and many small and medium-sized enterprises. In 2015, he supported Huawei in establishing a Trusted Computing research team in Germany.


Prof Yang Xiang

Swinburne University of Technology

Professor Yang Xiang received his PhD in Computer Science from Deakin University, Australia. He is currently a full professor and the Dean of Digital Research & Innovation Capability Platform, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. His research interests include cyber security, which covers network and system security, data analytics, distributed systems, and networking. In particular, he is currently leading his team developing active defense systems against large-scale distributed network attacks. He has published more than 200 research papers in many international journals and conferences. He served as the Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Security and Communication Networks (Wiley), and the Editor of Journal of Network and Computer Applications. He is the Coordinator, Asia for IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.


Elisa BertinoProf Elisa Bertino

Purdue University, USA

Elisa Bertino is the Samuel Conte Term Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University and the director of the CyberSpace Security Lab (Cyber2SLab). In her role as Director of Cyber2SLab she leads multi-disciplinary research in information and systems security and privacy. Prior to joining Purdue, she was a professor and department head at the Department of Computer Science and Communication of the University of Milan. She has been a visiting researcher at the IBM Research Laboratory (now Almaden) in San Jose, at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, at Rutgers University, at Telcordia Technologies. Her recent research focuses on digital identity management, biometrics, data trustworthiness, privacy techniques, security for sensors and drones. She is a Fellow member of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. She received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “For outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data management systems” and the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for “Pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems”. She received the SIGSCA 2014 Outstanding Contributions Award “For her seminal research contributions and outstanding leadership to Data Security and Privacy for the past 25 years”. She has been inducted in the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) Hall of Fame in October 2017.


Prof Jill Slay

La Trobe University

Professor Jill Slay is Optus Chair of Cyber Security at La Trobe University and Director of Cyber Resilience Initiatives for the Australian Computer Society. She has established an international research reputation in cyber security (particularly Digital Forensics) and has worked in collaboration with many industrial partners.  She was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to the information technology industry through contributions in the areas of forensic computer science, security, protection of infrastructure and cyber-terrorism.  She is a Fellow of ACS and a Fellow of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, both for her service to the information security industry (and is MACS CP and holds CISSP and CCFP certifications). She has published one book and more than 120 refereed book chapters, journal articles or research papers in information assurance, critical infrastructure protection, security and forensic computing in the last 10 years.  She has completed the supervision of 19 PhDs and many Masters and Honours theses and has been awarded over AUD 2 million in Australian Government Category 1 research income, including a Future Fellowship.


Hussein AbbassProf Hussein Abbass

University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy

Hussein Abbass is a Professor in the School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW@ADFA) in Canberra, Australia. He is a fellow of the Australian Computer Society (FACS), a fellow of the Operational Research Society (FORS,UK); a fellow of the Institute Management and Leaders of Australia (FIML), and the Vice-president for Technical Activities (2016-2019) for the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He is an associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. On Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Trans. on Cybernetics, IEEE Trans. on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, IEEE Trans. on Computational Social Systems, and four other journals. His current research contributes to trusted autonomy with an aim to design next generation trusted artificial intelligence systems that seamlessly integrate humans and autonomous systems. His interdisciplinary work fuses artificial intelligence, big data, cognitive science, operations research, and robotics.


A/Prof Ben Rubinstein

University of Melbourne

Ben Rubinstein is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, with interests spanning statistical machine learning, security and privacy, and databases. His research has helped identify and plug side-channel attacks against the popular Firefox browser; apply privacy attacks against Kaggle’s popular machine learning crowdsourcing platform; assess Transport for NSW’s Opal card open data release; and deanonymise an unprecedented Australian Medicare 2016 data release, prompting introduction of the Re-identification Offence Bill 2016. His work has been recognised through the Australian Research Council DECRA and Young Tall Poppy Science awards; he has served on the Australian Academy of Science National Committee on ICS; and over 4 years at Melbourne has been awarded $2.1m in competitive funding ($1.94 as lead-CI) including as lead of a cross-institutional Data61 CRP funded by a DSTG-NGTF on Adversarial Machine Learning for Cyber. Previously Rubinstein has been employed in the research divisions of Microsoft, Google, Intel and Yahoo! (US); followed by a short stint at IBM Research Australia. As a full-time Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, Rubinstein shipped production systems for record linkage in Bing and the Xbox360, matching billions of records daily. Rubinstein earned the PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2010).


TsunProf Chang-Tsun Li

Charles Sturt University

Chang-Tsun Li received his BEng degree in electrical engineering from National Defence University (NDU), Taiwan, in 1987, the MSc degree in computer science from U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, USA, in 1992, and the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Warwick, UK, in 1998. He was an associate professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering at NDU during 1998-2002 and a visiting professor of the Department of Computer Science at U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in the second half of 2001.  He was a professor of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, UK, until Dec 2016.  He is currently a professor of the School of Computing and Mathematics, and Director of Data Science Research Unit, Charles Sturt University, Australia.  His research interests include multimedia forensics and security, biometrics, data mining, machine learning, data analytics, computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and content-based image retrieval.  The outcomes of his multimedia forensics research have been translated into award-winning commercial products protected by a series of international patents and have been used by a number of police forces and courts of law around the world. He is currently Associate Editor of the EURASIP Journal of Image and Video Processing (JIVP) and Associate of Editor of IET Biometrics.  He involved in the organisation of many international conferences and workshops and also served as a member of the international program committees for several international conferences.  He is also actively contributing keynote speeches and talks at various international events.