November 2020 SCS Awards

There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate impact. Muhammed developed a quantum-safe privacy-preserving blockchain protocol called MatRiCT which has been patented by D61 where Muhammed was the sole inventor. The case is very well documented and Muhammed’s h-index is impressive for his level.

In collaboration with Ag+Food and with commercial backing of Digital Agriculture Services (DAS), Peter Caccetta, Joanne Chia, Simon Collings, Drew Devereux, Zheng-Shu Zhou, Roger Lawes, Gonz Mata have developed a comprehensive annual map of winter crop types in the high intensity agriculture regions of Australia. Crop ID was then successfully transferred to DAS, who now offers it as a commercial product. This is an example of technology that has been successfully implemented and delivered end-to-end, with commercial adoption as a result.

Learning Analytics is about deriving insights from online educational course metadata, to improve the learning experiences and outcomes of students however Privacy is a major concern in this data. Measuring the risks of re-identifying students and mitigating risk in such data is critical for data custodians in the EdTech sector. Within the CRCP Project on Private Data Analytics, Thierry Rakotoarivelo, Raghav Bhaskar, Jonathan Chan, Ming Ding, David Smith and Elliott Vercoe has successfully delivered research and technology to the external customer Practera, including the Adaption and Deployment of ISP’s R4 (Re-identification Risk Ready Reckoner) software in Practera’s Secure Collaborative Environment for evaluation and integration. The team has done excellent work for this project and has evidence of a good relationship with the customer, as there is a potential ongoing project with the customer and other interested parties.

Smart Shield is a research project which explores the use of AI/ML in detecting previously unseen phishing emails to protect the government, businesses and public from zero-day attacks. The team, Mahathir Almashor, Sharif Abuadbba and Raj Gaire partnered with the customer (WA DGov Office) to identify and formulate this research problem. The customer strongly endorsed this project to the Cybersecurity CRC, which fully funded it with approx. $1M. DPC WA stated that they use this documentation to persuade sister agencies of the project’s value and professionalism. The Smart Shield team has managed this project very well, with clear evidence of customer satisfaction. New project proposals are being formulated and there are clear possibilities for future funding and extension of the project.

Ejaz Ahmed (under the guidance of DSS GL) initiated a collaboration between Distributed Systems Security (DSS) group and Sungkyunkwan university (SKKU) of South Korea, which resulted in visit from Professor Hyoungshick Kim along with10 of his students to collaborate on research projects in Data61 priority areas of cyber security and AI. The collaboration resulted in several research publication in top-ranked conferences for cyber-security including: – USENIX Security 2020 (core category A*) – SRDS 2020 (core category A) – ACM ASIACCS 2020 (core category B). This is a good example of research impact through international collaboration and student engagement. This case is further strengthened by the award of a key paper as a result of the collaboration.

Qinghua Lu demonstrated deep expertise in various SE areas, with great potential to advance in area. Qinghua has been taking the leading role to drive the research on emerging software architectures in AAP team. This led to 20+ high quality publication on software architecture for blockchain systems and federated/edge learning systems in top venues, including IEEE Software, IEEE IoT Journal, SPE, IEEE ICSA. Qinghua is leading a CRP with UTS, which led to two co-authored papers published on top machine learning venues, AAAI 2020 and NeurIPS 2020. Qinghua has contributed to editorial boards and externally funded projects. Currently having over 1200 citations, her international visibility is clearly demonstrated and growing.

Xinlong Guan has demonstrated deep expertise and innovation in engineering in the projects that he has been involved in. He has overcome challenges in the projects and played a key role in the success of the projects. For example, Xinlong contributed to the “Urban Data Market”, with responsibilities including judgement and adaptation of techniques and libraries, analyses of experimental results where no standard procedure existed, and experimental design and maintenance of complex software. Xinlong has performed well and above his CSOF level in the work that he has done.

Elliot has demonstrated deep expertise and complex problem solving skills, that together are well beyond his current CSOF level. His contributions are beyond expectations. For example, in Privacy Preserving Technologies for Energy pilot study, Elliott tackled some very challenging tasks for software development and implementation in analysis of power systems with privacy-preserving transformations that preserve fidelity with grid operating systems characteristics particularly power flow dynamics within the transmission grid.

Luke has clearly shown himself as a mediator where, even though the project hasn’t finished yet, there is already evidence of positive intermediate outcomes. For example, he diplomatically assisted in the discussion where TS has special infrastructure requirements, convincing members of TS to use standard IM&T services where possible. Given his current CSOF-level, Luke has shown outstanding performance with valuable outcomes.