Team members

Dr. Brano Kusy – Principal Research Scientist & Research Group Leader

Dr. Brano Kusy is a principal research scientist and Group Leader of the Distributed Sensing Systems Group. His research is on the new frontiers in networked embedded systems, mobile and wearable computing, and Internet of Things. His work has focused on scalability and energy efficiency of resource-constrained distributed systems, coordinated control, spatio-temporal synchronization, reliable wireless communications, on-device machine learning, and adaptive sampling. Brano has applied wireless sensing technology across several domains, including behavior sensing of wildlife, pasture intake of livestock; high-granularity sensing of user comfort in commercial buildings; surface mine rehabilitation; and scalable underwater environmental surveys.

Brano is an internationally respected scientist. He has served as the General Chair of IPSN’20, is regularly involved in the Program Committees of top-ranked international conferences ACM SenSys, ACM/IEEE IPSN, EWSN, IEEE MASS, IEEE ICDCS and has served on the TinyOS Core Working Group. His publications have more than 6500 citations and an h-index of 29 and his work on Flooding Time-Synchronization Protocol won the prestigious “Test of Time Award” from ACM SensSys conference. Prior to his work at CSIRO, Brano has obtained a Masters degree in Computer Science from Comenius University, Slovakia, a PhD degree in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University, USA, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Leo Guibas at Stanford University between 2007 and 2009.

Dr. Jiajun Liu – Principal Research Scientist, Science Leader & Team Leader, Distributed Intelligence

Dr. Jiajun Liu received his PhD/BEng from the University of Queensland, Australia, and Nanjing University, China, in 2013 and 2006, respectively. He worked as an Associate Professor in AI with the Renmin University of China before joining CSIRO, and co-founded a start-up that developed AI-driven software systems and solutions for major banks, e-commerce platforms, etc.

From 2006 to 2008, he also worked as a Researcher/Software Engineer with IBM China Research/ Development Labs on supercomputing. He also serves as a reviewer/TPC member for numerous international journals and conferences.

His research mainly focuses on Machine Learning and Data Science, in particular in Computer Vision, Graph Learning, and Multimedia Retrieval, and Distributed Learning. And at DSSG he is looking into how to make sensing systems more intelligent, sustainable and trustworthy with AI.

Chris Sharman – Senior Engineer & Team Leader, Cyber-Physical Data

Chris Sharman is a team leader and senior engineer with over a decade experience in developing environmental monitoring and decision support platforms. Working across several domains including marine monitoring, agriculture and aquaculture. Chris has most recently focused on building innovative platform solutions for real-time environmental observations with embedded analytics for decision support applications. Chris has experience leading delivery projects with a client and impact focus whilst working closely with specialist domain expertise. Previous projects have included innovative real-time sensing platforms, soil mapping and sampling systems, low-cost marine sensing systems, robotic sensing platforms and cloud based sensor data management with embedded analytics.

Dr Philip Valencia – Senior Research Engineer & Team Leader, Embedded Intelligence

Philip Valencia is Senior Research Engineer and leader of the Embedded Intelligence team. With over a decade experience in developing low power wireless sensor network technologies for real-time tracking and measurement of physiological and behavioural characteristics of animals. Based in the Autonomous Systems program at the CSIRO, he has focussed predominately on agricultural applications which can benefit from the unprecedented spatiotemporal sensing that can be delivered by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Through this research, Philip has been involved in Virtual Fencing, environmental sensing of the farm, gas concentration measurement within the rumen of cattle and sheep, location and behavioural monitoring and classification of behavioural states of various animals.

Philip has 3 patents, authored 4 book chapters, 50+ publications with more than 1100 citations and a H-index of 15. His vision is to embed machine learning capabilities into the highly constrained devices used for WSNs to facilitate intelligent pervasive sensing and decision making. As a result this will enable the autonomous management of complex systems, that previously required significant human involvement.

Peter Taylor – Senior Software Engineer

Peter is a senior software engineer and international leader in hydrological data exchange systems. He is the lead author of WaterML2.0 part 1 (time-series) and part 2 (ratings and gaugings), which are now both adopted international standards for data exchange. He chaired the WaterML2.0 Standards Working Group, a collaboration involving many large environmental organisations, including the US Geological Survey, the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Peter has led a range of projects using real-time sensor data and models to inform environmental decision-making. Before working at CSIRO Peter worked for KISTERS and Hydro Tasmania, where he consulted international firms in environmental monitoring and modelling. He is an active member of the Open Geospatial Consortium.

John McCulloch- Senior Research Engineer

John is a research engineer currently working in CSIRO’s Data61 business. He has a robotics background and has previously developed and commissioned autonomous catamarans and submarines. For the last few years John has been managing CSIRO projects in the marine and pond aquaculture space. Currently John is leading a project developing situational awareness and decision support systems for mollusc aquaculture. Under this project CSIRO has developed and deployed a data management and visualisation system for the Tasmanian Shellfish Quality Assurance Program (TSQAP). This system ingests data from several different organisations, including some CSIRO developed environmental monitoring nodes and provides information relevant to public health in the context of each of the State’s shellfish growing zones. This information is used by TSQAP to assist their closure decision making.
More widely, the team John works closely with, have been developing mollusc and salmon bio-sensors. The current generation of salmon biosensors are archival, and the current mollusc sensors are real-time. CSIRO’s telemetry units are providing oyster physiology (heart rate & gaping) as well as water quality (temperature, salinity, DO, depth, chlorophyll) in real-time from farms in southern Tasmania.

Dr Regis Riveret – Senior Research Scientist

Dr. Regis Riveret is senior research scientist. His research regards computational law and more generally tools stemming from the intersection of computer sciences and normative systems, with applications ranging from legal expert systems and smart contracts to norm-oriented cyber-physical systems.

Regis held positions at Imperial College London (UK) as research associate and Marie Curie fellow, Amadeus/SII (France) as software engineer in the team of travel electronic policies, and University of Aberdeen (UK) as research associate.

Regis has a PhD in Computer Science & Law, obtained from CIRSFID, University of Bologna (Italy), Master of Engineering in Telecomnunication, obtained from Télécom Bretagne, Institut Mines-Télécom (France), Maîtrise de Physique (four years in physics) completed at Bristol University (UK) as Erasmus student from University of Caen (France).

Dr Reza Arablouei – Research Scientist

Reza’s current research interest are in hyperspectral/image processing, statistical machine learning and deep neural networks. His previous research has mostly been around adaptive and distributed signal processing.

He has BSc and MSc degrees both in electrical engineering and a PhD degree in telecommunications engineering received from the University of South Australia in 2013. Before joining CSIRO in 2015, he worked as a research fellow at the University of South Australia.

Dr Sara Khalifa – Research Scientist

Dr Khalifa is currently a researcher at Data61|CSIRO, Australia and a casual academic staff at School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Her current research interests include smart wearables, Internet of Things, energy harvesting, pattern recognition, human activity recognition and indoor positioning. She is a Technical Program Committee Member in the Work in Progress Session (IEEE PerCom, 2016) and IEEE Workshop on Internet of Things 2016 (WIoT 2016).

She received a postdoctoral writing fellowship from NICTA (Dec 2015-Mar 2016) and worked as a research assistant (Sep 2015-Nov 2015) at CSE, UNSW. She received many awards including”2016 NASSCOM Highly Commended Award” and “2015 Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CISRA) Best Research Paper Award at UNSW”. She has authored more than 10 papers in the area of pervasive computing and pattern recognition. She has been a reviewer of a number of conference papers and journals.

She completed a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from UNSW in February 2016. She obtained MSc and BSc in Computer Science from Zagazig University, Egypt in 2011 and 2007, respectively. She has secured First Class with Distinction throughout her studies. She was a Lecturer Assistant in the Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, Egypt from September 2007- January 2012. During this period, Sara taught various Computer Science subjects and worked as a co-Supervisor for several undergraduate student projects. Read More

Dr Yiran Shen – Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Yiran Shen is a postdoctoral research fellow at Data 61, CSIRO. He obtained his PhD degree from University of New South Wales under the supervision of Prof. Chun Tung Chou and Dr. Wen Hu. His research interests include realtime machine learning on embedded systems, IoTs security, mobile/wearable computing. He published regularly on top conferences like SenSys, IPSN, Ubicomp, Percom and top journals like IEEE TMC, IEEE TDSC, Computer Networks.

Dr Volkan Dedeoglu – Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Volkan Dedeolgu is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at CSIRO Data61. He is a member of the Distributed Sensing Systems Group led by Prof. Raja Jurdak. His current research focuses on blockchain-based IoT security and privacy. Before joining Data61, Volkan worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Texas A&M University on physical layer security for communications under the supervision of Prof. Joseph Boutros. He designed error correcting codes for secure and reliable communications on compound channels. He completed his PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from University of South Australia in 2013, under the supervision of Dr. Alex Grant and Dr. Sylvie Perreau. His PhD research focused on energy efficient wireless sensor networks, data gathering, target tracking, cross-layer optimization, and distributed algorithms. He obtained MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Koc University (Turkey, 2008), BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University (Turkey, 2006), and B.A. in Public Administration from Anadolu University (Turkey, 2008). During his postgraduate and postdoctoral years, Volkan taught undergraduate subjects in engineering and social sciences, and supervised undergraduate engineering students.

He is also interested in research commercialization and business model development. In 2016, he cofounded the Pictoris Data team and received a commercialization grant from Qatar Science and Technology Park Accelerator program. During the course of the Accelerator program, he worked for the development of a secure and reliable distributed storage system based on a patented technology co-invented by him. He also worked on the business model development for commercialization of the technology.

Dr Frank De Hoog – Post-retirement Fellow

Dr. Frank De Hoog is a Post-retirement Fellow at CSIRO. Dr de Hoog is recognized internationally as having made highly original and insightful contributions to the advancement of applied, computational and industrial mathematics, and has contributed substantially to the mathematics profession. He is the recipient of the 2017 Hannan Medal. The importance and significance of his theoretical and applied contributions, and their flow‐on contributions to the advancement of science and to improving the efficiency of industrial processes, have been recognised by various awards. The impact of his industrial research has been exceptional in terms of the speed of implementation by industry and the subsequent contributions to Australia’s export economy.

Mac Coombe -Engineer

Mac Coombe is a Mechatronics Engineer with a focus on real-time acquisition and processing of environmental sensor data. Since joining the CSIRO in 2011, he has been involved in a diverse range of projects, including projects in e-health, environmental sensing, geophysical sensor systems, and machine learning in oceanography. His current work involves development of middleware systems for real-time ingestion, processing, storage and visualisation of time-series sensor data, and on development of machine-learning systems for identifying and visualising features of interest in time-series and gridded data. This work provides a platform for realising a vision of cheap, simple and ubiquitous environmental data accessibility for individuals, businesses and governments.

David Biggins- Research Projects Officer

David Biggins is a Software Engineer with a background in electronic engineering. Davids most recent work with CSIRO has been working with the mining industry to develop a UAV platform for mapping inaccessible areas in underground mines using UAVs as a robotic platform and photogrammetry. The maps created consist of 3D textured point clouds and will result in more profitable and safer mining by giving mine planners information they have not had access to in the past. David is a member of the CSIRO Data61, Cyber Physical Systems research program and is located at Sandy Bay, Tasmania.

Daniel Hugo – Electronics and Software Engineer

I am an electronics engineer with almost ten years experience of contributing my skills to CSIRO’s research projects across various scientific domains. My work typically involves the electronics design, firmware/software development, integration, testing, production, and ultimately deployment of autonomous systems. These have included terrestrial and marine wireless sensor networks, standalone remote telemetry units, miniaturised data-loggers, and marine robotic platforms. These systems have helped our scientists and industrial partners to enhance Australia’s terrestrial agriculture, salmon and shellfish aquaculture, and coastal water monitoring practices. I have also contributed to embedded operating systems, and components of CSIRO’s SensorCloud middleware.

Nic Heaney – Engineer

Jace started working at CSIRO during 2015 as an undergraduate, where he worked and also completed his thesis around low power indoor localisation on Android phones using Bluetooth. Jace has recently been working on the VPDaD (Vertebrate Pest Detect and Deter) project where he has mainly been responsible for the server back end, mobile phone application and infrastructure for long range communication and configuration of remote nodes.

d operating systems, and components of CSIRO’s SensorCloud middleware.

Lachlan Currie – Engineer

John Scolaro- Engineer

John is an embedded engineer working in conjunction with Ceres Tag to create a smart ear tag for animals. He graduated with first class honours from the University of Queensland in 2017 with Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics. Aside from PCB design and embedded programming, John is interested in machine learning, and working with large amounts of data to come to unique conclusions.