Our Students

Benjamin Retschlag | UQ

  • Benjamin is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland (UQ) and the CSIRO Responsible Innovation Future Science Platform (RI FSP), and is funded as part of the CSIRO-UQ Collaboration. His current research interests are focused on the intersection of ethical and methodological issues in data science, and on the formalisation of moral decision-making in automated systems.
  • Publications: ORCID
  • Tags: Moral philosophy | Philosophy and ethics of technology | Research ethics | Responsible innovation

Ben Harper | University of Melbourne

  • Ben is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. He received a BSc. and MSc, both majority in Physics at the University of Melbourne. His Masters research project was on classical simulation of quantum computation, using stabilizer simulation techniques, and using this simulator to implement quantum error correcting codes. Now for his PhD project, Ben is working to develop a quantum compiler – taking high level code and transforming it into something that can be run on physical machines.
  • Tags: Tags: Quantum Computing | Compilers | Quantum Error Correction | Simulation

Bushra Sabir | University of Adelaide

  • Bushra is a Data61 PhD student from the University of Adelaide working on Adversarial Machine learning in the Cyber-security domain. Specially she is working on evasion and poisoning attacks and defences in Cyber-security systems such as phishing, spam, malware, intrusion and data exfiltration detectors. Previously, she worked on two studies after commencing her PHD which are under review.
  • 1. Machine Learning for Detecting Data Exfiltration: A Review (ACM Computing Survey)
    2. Impact of Adversarial Examples on Phishing URL Classifiers (IEEE symposium of Security and Privacy)
  • Publications: IMTDE
  • Tags: Adversarial Machine Learning | Deep learning | Cybersecurity

David James Holmes | Edith Cowan University

  • David is a Cyber Security CRC PhD student from the Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, Western Australia. David’s PhD project relates to the semantic modelling of digital twins from a cyber security defence automation perspective. David also has an interest in the blending of blockchain technology into the digital twin and cyber-physical system domains. 
David comes to the research environment with a Master of Network Technology, a Master of Cybersecurity and extensive experience in private enterprise, where, as a network engineer, he worked for over 25 years in Australia and in other countries around the world providing business end-user network technical support.

  • This business experience gives David a unique perspective on the mutually beneficial returns from the interaction between research and commerce where his focus is on making research relevant to the business model.

  • Publications: Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8644-4387
  • Tags: Network Engineering | Honeypots | Semantic Modelling | Digital Twins | Blockchaining

David Nguyen | UNSW

David is a PhD candidate at the UNSW Sydney and Cybersecurity CRC. His current research interests lie in developing machine learning techniques applied to Cybersecurity. Existing research focuses on graph neural networks to improve existing deception capabilities across various forms of media. David has also spent several years working in industry as a commercial manager and machine learning engineer within Australian and international technology companies. 

  • Publications: Orcid
  • Tags: Machine Learning | Graph Neural Networks | Cybersecurity | Deception Technology

Erik Buchholz | UNSW

Erik is a Computer Science PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney and is working with the Cyber Security Collaborative Research Centre. His research focuses on the question of how collected data can be used safely for research purposes without harming privacy, e.g., preventing the re-identification of individuals from a shared dataset. Before coming to Sydney, Erik completed both his bachelor’s and master’s degree at the RWTH Aachen in Germany. Ever since his first seminar during his bachelor’s degree, Erik worked on projects that aim at the improvement of user privacy. For his bachelor’s thesis, he developed a platform that gives the users control over their own data and the decision of who is allowed to utilize it. In his master’s thesis, Erik developed a prototype for a privacy-preserving exchange platform that allows exchanging process parameters in industrial settings.

  • Personal Bio Website: https://erikbuchholz.de/
  • Publications: Google Scholar
  • Highlights: Personal privacy is a human right, and privacy protection plays a crucial role in today’s interconnected world. I am very excited to help finding solutions that allow the protection of individuals’ privacy without preventing sensible utilization of data and without hindering progress. By protecting everyone’s privacy, I want to contribute to making this world a safer and better place.
  • Tags: Privacy-enhancing Technologies | Cybersecurity | Sensitive Information Sharing

Falih Febrinanto | Federation University Australia

  • Falih is currently a Ph.D. Student at Federation University Australia, Ballarat Campus and working under the supervision of Dr. Kristen Moore (Data61), Dr. Chandra Thapa (Data61), and A/Professor Feng Xia (FedUni). His current research focuses on deploying graph learning and lifelong learning for human-centric applications. The activities include enabling the learning agent to learn continuously for addressing incremental tasks of graph data in a specific domain of misinformation and malicious activities.
  • Publications: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=wqzYPTcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
  • Tags: Graph Learning | Lifelong Learning | Deep Learning | Human-Centric Cyber Security

Farina Riaz | University of South Queensland

  • Farina is a PhD Student at CSIRO Data61. She has done master’s in computer software engineering from Pakistan with Internship at CERN Lab Switzerland. The project was focused on Grid Automation. She has also worked as Software Quality Assurance Engineer at NERO Company in 2007. She has 9 journal and conference publications. As part of her PhD, she is HDR Student representative at UniSQ research group, involved in taking all important decisions for research. She has 4 years teaching experience as a lecturer in different Universities in Dubai, UAE. Her current research is focused on Image classification using Quantum Machine Learning for Intelligent Transportation Systems. She has designed few new models that are already outperforming Classical Machine Learning as part of her PhD at CSIRO Data61.
  • Publications: ResearchGate
  • Tags: Quantum Machine Learning | Quantum Cryptography | Quantum Artificial Intelligence | Signal Processing | Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks
  • Highlight: ‘New technology always inspires me. I love working at CSIRO Data61 as it has opened a broad prospect towards the new challenging research and how to apply problem solving skills. CSIRO spotlight me as “Women in Technology 2022”on my work in Quantum Artificial Intelligence Research and the appreciation and love I have received in my PhD journey; I will always cherish.’

Feixue Yan | Swinburne University of Technology

  • Feixue received a Master of Software Engineering Degree from the Zhejiang University of China. She currently is a Data61 PhD student from the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. The focus of Feixue’s PhD is providing interpretability for cyber-security systems, related to AI. She is engaged in explaining complex and obscure neural networks. Previously, she worked on a critical functional department, with her specialty of engineering such as software design, architecture development and system reconstruction.
  • Publications: dblp |Google Scholar
  • Tags: Interpretability | Software Engineering | Machine Learning

Geetanjli Sharma | La Trobe University

  • Geetanjli pursued a Master of Information Technology degree from La Trobe University, Australia. She is a PhD candidate at the La Trobe University, Australia. She has spent couple of years as Software Developer in Amdocs, India. Her experience includes working on telecommunications and DTH projects that involves optimizing the services for better performance and high customer satisfaction. Her research interests focus on detailed study and mitigations of cyber security issues in different sectors i.e Health, Agriculture and Fintech using Distributed Machine Learning.
  • Tags: Federated Learning | Distributed Machine Learning | Cyber Security

Gnanakumar Thedchanamoorthy | Charles Sturt University

  • Gnana is a PhD student attached to the School of Computing & Mathematics, Charles Sturt University. His interests are in privacy preserving data collection techniques for statistical aggregation. Currently his area of interest lies around Local Differential Privacy. He is being supported by a scholarship from the Cyber Security Corporate Research Centre.
  • Publications: Orcid ; Researchgate ;  Google scholar;
  • Tags: Data Privacy | Differential Privacy | Local Differential Privacy.

Guoxin Sun | The University of Melbourne

  • Guoxin is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, the University of Melbourne. His research interests lie in the domain of cyber-physical security, machine learning, game theory and system theory. He received the B.S. degree in 2017 and the M.E. degree in 2019 from the University of Melbourne.
  • Publications: Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0534-2440
  • Tags: Cyber-Physical security | Machine learning | Game theory | System theory
  • Highlight: Working as a summer intern in CSIRO’s Data61 with brilliant people inspired me to become part of this leading digital research network. I believe when great minds collide, giant leaps are made.

Haonan Zhong | UNSW

  • My name is Haonan Zhong, honour-year computer science student from UNSW. I’m interested in artificial intelligence technologies, in particular computer vision technologies and their related applications. My research topic for this summer student vacation project is security in AI, especially research about the characteristics about GAN model which may result to some security issues. And this project is supervised by Jason Xue, Tina Wu, Chamikara Mahawaga Arachchige and Chehara Pathmabandu, they are all experts in security area and give me a lot of suggestions. Through this project at CSIRO, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of cutting-edge artificial intelligence research and to develop and enhance my research skills and prepare me for honours degree in the coming year and for my PhD application afterwards.
  • Tags:AI Security and Privacy
  • Highlight: It is my pleasure to be a summer vacation student of Data61. Hope to try my best to make an effort in research field.

Hetong Jiang | University of Queensland

  • Hetong is a first year PhD student at The University of Queensland. He received his bachelor degree majoring in mechanical engineering from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia in 2018, and Master of IT degree from The University of Queensland, Australia in 2020. His research interests include data provenance, distributed Storage and any cyber security-related areas.

  • Publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4149-6244
  • Tags: Data Provenance | Distributed Storage | Cyber Security

Hua Ma | UoA

  • Hua Ma is a first year student

     at the University of Adelaide. Her research interests are machine learning security and optimization with focus on tiny machine learning which are optimized to run on very low-power and small footprint Internet of Things (IoTs) devices.

  • Tags: Cyber Security | Machine learning

Hossein Rahimpour | UNSW

  • Hossein Rahimpour is a PhD student at UNSW and CSIRO’s Data61. He is the recipient of the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship as well as the Cybersecurity Cooperative Research Centre scholarship 2021-2024. Hossein is a Chartered Professional Electrical Engineer and holds Mphil degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Newcastle. He worked over 15 years in various roles in power industry with expertise in high voltage, transformers and asset management. Hossein’s PhD project explores the application of AI techniques in cyber protection of smart transformers in modern electrical network. The continuing digitisation of power grid and the evolving cyber-attacks motivated him to pursue a higher degree research in this area.
  • Tags: Cyber Security | Artificial Intelligence | Smart Grid | Smart Transformers

Hui Hui Gong | University of Sydney

  • Huihui is a PhD candidate at Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, the University of Sydney, under the supervision of Dr. Chang Xu and Dr. Siqi Ma (CSIRO’s Data61). His main research areas are machine learning and adversarial examples. Specifically, he is working at how to improve the performance and robustness of deep neural networks.
  • Publications: Google scholar
  • Tags: Machine Learning | Adversarial Examples

Jiamin Chang | University of New South Wales

  • I am an honour year student from the University of New South Wales, majoring in Computer Science. I have some experience related to Computer Vision, Natural language Processing, and machine learning. My area of expertise is in the field of security in Artificial Intelligence (AI) this summer vacation project and would like to put my efforts into preventing damage current AI might cause in daily life. This experience in CSIRO helps me build a more holistic view of research and dig into cutting-edge knowledge of the area. These improvements will allow me to get better performance in future research and study.
  • Address: MARSFIELD, NSW 2122, AUSTRALIA
  • Tags: AI Security and Privacy
  • Highlight: I am honored to join Data61 as a vacation student and will do my best to contribute to this field with innovation.

Kane Walter | University of New South Wales

  • Kane is a Computer Science PhD candidate at UNSW working with The Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre on security of distributed machine learning. Previously completed a Bachelor of Computer Science (1st class) at UNSW which culminated in a thesis on satellite image retrieval using unsupervised machine learning models. Kane began his career in the healthcare setting but developed a passion for deep learning and is now dedicated to ensuring Australia can use this amazing technology in a safe and secure way.
  • Publications: orcid
  • Tags: Machine Learning | Cybersecurity | Federated Learning

Keerth Rathakumar | ANU

  • Keerth is a research affiliate of CSIRO. He gained his Bachelor of Science from ANU and worked in the analytics and software engineering industry before joining CSIRO. His research interests lie in representation learning. In particular, he is interested in interpretable generative models.
  • Tags: Generative models | Inference

Kevin Saric | QUT

  • Kevin is a commercially-minded QUT PhD candidate with over 20 years of experience in a diverse range of fields. These include cloud services (before it ever had such a name), banking, public health, energy, mining, and cybersecurity. He has the unusual distinction of having worked for 4 of CSIRO’s major business units in various capacities. He enjoys all things technical and reads as much as reasonably possible, and then some more.

Le Quoc Huy | University of Wollongong

  • Le is a PhD student at the University of Wollongong (UOW), sponsored by a CSIRO’s Data61 scholarship. In 2011, he received his Master Degree in Mathematics from Ho Chi Minh City University of Science, Vietnam, after a bachelor at the same university. From 2007 to 2016, he worked as a mathematics teacher in high school. Le also spent time as a research student in Japan. His current research interests include post-quantum cryptography, focusing especially on lattice-based cryptography.
  • Publications: Google scholar
  • Tags: Post-quantum Cryptography | Lattice-based Cryptography
  • Highlight: I am very grateful to CSIRO’s Data61 and respectable professors at both CSIRO’s Data61 and University of Wollongong for giving me a wonderful chance to work with them, helping me to push my passion and my research up.

Mathew Duong | The University of Adelaide

  • Mathew is a master’s student at the University of Adelaide. He received his bachelor’s degree in software engineering at the University of Adelaide in 2021. His research is centered in cyber security specially looking into vulnerability analysis using automated testing techniques.
  • Tags: Cyber Security | Fuzzing | Causality analysis

Michael Chesser | The University of Adelaide

  • Michael is a PhD student from the University of Adelaide focusing on binary vulnerability analysis using fuzzing techniques. He is particularly interested in manipulating and executing binaries in order to analyse them in new and unique ways.
  • Publications: Google Scholar
  • Tags: Cyber Security | Fuzzing | Emulation | Virtual Machine

Mohammad Sadegh Aslanpour | Monash University

  • Mohammad is a PhD student at Monash University, sponsored by a CSIRO’s Data61 scholarship. Formerly, he developed essential skills to be prepared for commencing a PhD by working around 8 years in industry, 3 years in academia and disseminating research findings in leading venues, simultaneously. Mohammad is currently pursuing his PhD at the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, under the supervision of Dr. Adel Nadjaran Toosi and Dr. Raj Gaire. Motivated by his passionate for expanding existing knowledge of distributed systems, his research is intended to extend the elasticity of cloud computing to the edge of the network to improve the performance of IoT/Smart applications and Microservices. Previously, he developed elasticity-related optimizations in cloud, but the emergence of Edge/Fog Computing and 5G networks made him enthusiastic about bringing the elasticity benefits to the edge to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) from both service providers and end-users’ perspective.
  • Publications:  Google Scholar; Publons; Research Gate; LinkedIn; ORCID
  • Tags: Distributed Systems | Cloud Computing | Edge/Fog Computing | Serverless Computing | Autonomic Computing
  • Highlight:  Reaching realistic solutions for challenging real-life problems in IT domain is what I am eager for. To be fulfilled, I am always looking for a chance to collaborate with not only CSIRO’s Data61 and Monash University researchers, but also other talented, experienced and like-minded researchers in the distributed systems community around the world. Working with people smarter than I always helps me to learn and make encouraging progress.

Robert Marlin | Queensland University of Technology

  • Robert worked as a Research Assistant at QUT in 2019 investigating blockchain within industry application. Currently Robert is undertaking a PhD degree with QUT, CSIRO, and Data61 researching “Distributed and Privacy Preserving Analytics of Smart Grid Data”. Robert has over a decade of hands on experience in the ITC industry, including working for 5 years as the Network Administrator for the Statistical Institute of Belize.
  • Tags: Machine Learning | Blockchain Technology | Cybersecurity

Roelien Christien Timmer | University of New South Wales

  • Roelien is a Cyber Security PhD candidate based in Sydney. Her research focuses on quantifying and optimising the performance of Cyber Deceptions. Her research will utilise modern techniques such as natural language processing and simulation testing to determine methods to compare Cyber Deceptions such as honey files. Previously, Roelien worked as a Research Analyst at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. She holds a Master in Econometrics from the University of Amsterdam.
  • Tags: Semantic Vector Space | Decoy Documents | Cyber Deception | Characteristic Metrics | Cyber Security | Honey files | Natural Language Processing | Data Science
  • Highlight:  I am thrilled to combine my love for coding and statistics to thwart espionage.

Sara Jafarbeiki | Monash University

  • Sara is currently a PhD student in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. She received her Bachelor and Master degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Saras research interests include deep neural networks, physical-layer network coding and applications of lattices in wireless communication.
  • Tags: Deep Learning | Wireless Communication | Coding Techniques | Lattices

Saud Khan | The Australian National University

  • Saud is a Doctoral Candidate with the School of Engineering at The Australian National University and Data61, CSIRO. He holds a first-class honours equivalent qualification and receives the equivalent Australian Government Research Training Program and CSIRO Postgraduate Research Scholarship. His previous background includes two years of full-time experience overseeing industrial project research at the Kumoh National Institute of Technology, South Korea, funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea (equivalent to Discovery Project of the Australian Research Council). His research focuses on bridging the gap between deep learning, the internet of things, and cybersecurity in the physical layer wireless communication domain.
  • Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eEe1-SkAAAAJ&hl=en
  • Tags: Deep Learning | Internet of Things | Wireless Communication | Physical Layer Security

Tom Roth | University of Technology, Sydney

  • Tom is currently a machine learning researcher with a current focus on adversarial machine learning in natural language processing. In a previous life, Tom worked as a data scientist building systems for Telstra, Caltex and Woolworths. He enjoys solving problems, building things, mathematics, writing, and long walks on the beach. You can learn more about Tom at tomroth.com.au
  • Publications: none yet! (but hopefully soon)
  • Tags: Adversarial Machine Learning | Robustness | Reinforcement Learning | Natural Language Processing
  • Highlight: I like breaking a problem down to the fundamentals and making solutions as simple as possible.

Xinyu Zhang | Monash University

  • Xinyu is a first year PhD candidate in the department of software and cybersecurity at Monash University, whose research is sponsored by Data61 CSIRO. Xinyu’s research focuses on developing post-quantum multiparty signatures based on symmetric primitives (e.g., hash functions, pseudo-random functions, and block ciphers). She is passionate about cryptography, especially digital signatures, and variants (i.e., signatures involving multiple signers). Currently, she is working on constructing post-quantum multi-signature protocol utilising symmetric primitives only. She is also interested in applying the protocol to blockchain-based applications such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based supply chain systems.
  • Publications: Google Scholar
  • Tags: Cryptography | Post-Quantum Cryptography | Symmetric Primitives | Blockchain

Yanjun Olivia Shen | Monash University

  • Olivia Shen is a first year PhD student at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University with research interests in searchable encryption, encrypted database, and privacy preserving crowdsourced data analytics in the broad Cyber Security subject domain.
  • Tags: Metadata Privacy | Searchable Encryption | Encrypted Database | Crowdsourcing | IoT

Zahra Mousavi | UoA

  • Zahra is a Ph.D. student with the Center for Research on Engineering Software Technologies (CREST) at the University of Adelaide. Her research interests include Natural language Processing and Information Extraction using Deep Learning methods and their applications in the Cyber Security domain. She has already worked on constructing a Persian wordnet and improving machine translation using this wordnet and verb sense disambiguation. Currently, she is working on security automation and orchestration leveraging NLP techniques.
  • Publications:  Orcid
  • Tags: Deep Learning | Natural Language Processing | Cybersecurity

Zhibo Xu | Monash University

  • Zhibo Xu is a PhD student at Monash University since 2022 under the supervision of Dr Xingliang Yuan and Dr Shangqi Lai. Prior to that, he received the Bachelor of Computer and Network Engineering (H1) from RMIT University in 2020. His research interests include using cryptographic tools to protect machine learning models, which leads to safe and secure training and inference of machine learning and AI models.
  • Tags: Machine Learning Privacy and Security | Privacy-preserving Machine Learning

Zian Liu | Swinburne University

  • Zian Liu is a first year PhD. student. His research focuses on Malware analysis in Cyber Security.
  • Tags: Malware Analysis | Cyber Security