November 2019 SCS Awards

Seyit brought his expertise in cybersecurity to the Cyber Security for Medical Device (CSfMD) project funded by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). His contribution helped the CSIRO project team to gain the trust of TGA on a sensitive project and create opportunities for future collaborations between CSIRO and TGA.

David demonstrated a strong command of setting up, managing, and extending collaborations to deepen the scientific output of Data61 and extend its research visibility with industries. These collaborations were across Data61 groups and CSIRO Business Units, as well as with external organisations. Not only did he successfully establish those collaborations, each of those was productive and led to a number of scientific publications and the implementation of software platforms.

Badiul put considerable effort into establishing connections with universities (both in Australia and overseas), and as a consequence he was able to attract several PhD candidates (based on the institutional and personal connections). In addition he contributed to technical development of prototypes used by the research team.

Surya Nepal, Dongxi Liu, Raj Gaire and Seung Jang showed strong commitment to their customer, and also achieved commitment from the customer. This is an ongoing project with continuous outputs that benefits the entire IoT community, for a very extensive period of time. The project will continue into its fifth year in 2020, which is a significant achievement for the team.

Qian obtained excellent and novel results using timing channels to prevent information leakage. The results were published in a top conference and the paper received Best Paper award, already attracting ~150 citations. This is the first principled approach which has had wide impact on security of computer systems, from cloud platforms to smart phones and browsers. It clearly demonstrated how it can be implemented in real world seL4 systems.

Chris’ research constitutes the next step towards a proper implementation of business process management on Blockchain. This is a highly important research area and the group has a number of (pending) patents in the field. Chris received the Best Paper award in BPM this year, which is the top conference in the field.

Sherry was invited by IEEE to write the blockchain book “Architecture for Blockchain Applications”, which summarises three years of blockchain research in software architecture and has been used to develop a blockchain course at UNSW and several short courses at different local and international universities. She has been playing a key role in the research activities around blockchain data migration, blockchain-based decentralised energy trading and management of blockchain-based secure data sharing over Web 3. The international impact and visibility of her work is evident.

Farhad has excelled in bringing science to real world problems, translating that to solutions and publishing strong scientific results evidenced by the 15 accepted over the past financial year. His commitment and science ability is beyond that of his CSOF-level.

Silvano contributed to the development of new techniques for efficiently checking the compliance of business processes. In addition to proving the correctness of the proposed techniques he created prototypes implementing them. He further empirically evaluated the prototypes showing that the new prototypes, for the cases where they apply, dramatically outperform other implementations.

Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) is an essential and often neglected aspect. Peter Hoefner, Peter Chubb and Ihor Kuz contributed significant time in planning and organising the event (in a small site, disconnected from larger and more organised sites). Their effort should be taken as an example to inspire similar approaches across Data61.

Marthie has been very active from both a scientific point of view (with strong and successful involvement in a number of projects), and a science citizenship point of view (with the organisation of several events), as well as international collaborations that could benefit CSIRO.

Terri provided excellent support as the secretariat, administrator, and project manager for the Consumer Data Rights Data Standards Body (DSB). She is always professional and reliable in delivering on and chasing down actions for the DSB. Terri went above and beyond in her role and her work has been instrumental to ensure the effective operation of the Consumer Data Standards Advisory Committee since its formation. This has been affirmed by both the Chair and the Technical Director of the DSB, explaining they couldn’t have been supported in a better way.