Team@DATA61

Members (visiting MIT)

fullsizerender_3 — Dr. Manuel Cebrian (team leader)

Dr. Manuel Cebrian is principal research scientist with the Data61 Unit at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Melbourne, Australia; and a founding member of Scalable Cooperation, an MIT Media Lab research group.

Cebrian earned a PhD in computer science from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, where his thesis received the dissertation of the year award for his work on plagiarism networks. Cebrian’s work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences. His primary interest is understanding how social networking can make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems. His work is best illustrated by his victories in the DARPA Network Challenge and the Department of State Tag Challenge, and most importantly, his brutal defeat in the DARPA Shredder Challenge, the first case of large-scale crowdsourcing sabotage ever studied. Visit his personal website to know more about him.

After graduating with BSc in Physics from Belarusian State University Yury has held research positions at Heat and Mass Transfer Institute (National Academy of Sciences, Belarus) and NTLab, a fabless microelectronics design company.

Yury proceeded to obtain his PhD in Physics from Monash University, working at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Design in Light Metals. His thesis on autocatalysis in Al-Cu alloys was recognised with a 2nd place in the Centre’s Best Thesis competition in 2012.

Yury joined DATA61@CSIRO in 2012 and contributes to disaster management projects within Environmental and Societal Resilience team of ORG, and Computational Social Science research of Human Dynamics group. His latest research titled ‘Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity,’ was published in Science Advances and featured by Science Magazine, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Michigan Daily, Die Welt,Deutschlandfunk, Dagens Nyheter, Science News, El Pais, La Vanguardia, Altmetric. Visit his scholar page to have a full list of his publications.

hc_2 — Dr. Caron Haohui Chen (researcher)

Caron holds a BSE degree in Computer Science from Shantou University, an MSc in Geographical Information Science from Sun Yat-sen University and a PhD in Geomatics (now Infrastructure Engineering) from the University of Melbourne.

Before joining DATA61@CSIRO, Caron and a fellow PhD student launched a startup, Nearbyr, and an app of the same name designed to help restaurants attract customers. Nearbyr enjoyed early success, but Caron and his partner quickly ran out of funds, and Caron joined the Human Dynamics team with eager to know more about crowds.

Based on the concept of a friendship paradox, Caron and his fellows has developed a prototype iOS application (DOX) that detects when a particular topic exhibits a lead time in popularity amongst “sensor” individuals and as such uncovers emergent trends before they become well publicised.

Caron also works closely with his colleagues from Sun Yat-sen University to study China’s urban problems. They participated in the Shanghai Open Data Application competition and won the Excellence Prize in November 2015 for a draft master plan for bicycle infrastructure to complement existing public transport networks in the inner Shanghai. Visit his scholar page to have a full list of his publications.