Today we celebrated the collective success of our centre participants at the QUT Centre for Data Science 2020 Centre Excellence Awards ceremony.
Five of our researchers received excellence awards and four were highly commended, to recognise their contribution to excellence in data science research and our community.
The awards value strong, active collaboration with researchers across wide-ranging disciplines to innovate above and beyond discipline-specific approaches to solve common challenges.
Thank you to all who submitted award nominations. We congratulate the following award recipients:
Student research publication excellence: Gaurangi Anand
Gaurangi Anand’s research is inspired by ‘the human visual cognition’. It incorporates the sense of visual perception into the learning framework for time-series in an unsupervised manner, adding to the versatility of the approach. An extension of this work has been accepted for publication in ICONIP 2020, a tier A conference. She has collaborated with robotics researchers, and has co-authored a joint publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2020) – one of the top 5 journals in the field of robotics with h5-index of 53.
Gaurangi’s other achievements this year include being:
- nominated by QUT for a Google PhD fellowship
- offered a postdoctoral research fellowship position at CSIRO (AI for Biological Systems – Spatiotemporal representation learning)
- accepted for publication in Knowledge-Based Systems (article is in press) – one of the top 10 journals in the field of AI with h5-index of 85 as per Google Scholar Metrics.
Centre Director’s prize for excellence: Dan Li
The outcomes of Dan Li’s Master of Philosophy research is in press, soon to be published in up-and-coming Q2 journal, Econometrics and Statistics – an ideal outlet for this paper given her research is at the interface of these two fields.
Dan’s work is considered to be outstanding for this level of study, considering the complexity of the material she has worked with in two different fields. Dan also effectively facilitated a cross disciplinary collaboration with mathematics and business researchers, strengthening the connection across the faculties and potentially leading to future collaborations for our centre. Dan is now completing her PhD project: Efficient estimation of multivariate volatility models based at the centre.
Outreach and engagement excellence: Matthew Adams
Dr Matthew Adams’ cross-disciplinary approach has led him to release two high-impact first-author papers in 2020 that are co-authored by specialists from a wide range of institutions, working in disciplines from seagrass ecology to engineering, decision science and statistics.
He also co-led a series of workshops this year on evaluating and communicating models and model performance that engaged participants working on water modelling projects across the university, industry and government sectors.
Trans-disciplinary research excellence: Pascal Duijf
This year, Dr Pascal Duijf’s trans-disciplinary approaches have been key to the standard of excellence he has achieved, with examples including:
- Leading a large research study, published in Nature Communications. Dr Duijf and team developed a new computational approach to identify large genetic abnormalities in cancer cells. They then created an innovative machine learning pipeline, which led them to discover dozens of new opportunities to treat 17 types of cancer.
- Using biomedical data, he also discovered a new potential pre-disposing risk factor for severe COVID-19.
- Actively connecting biomedical researchers, clinicians and data scientists to accelerate research and increase numbers of publications and citations.
Early and mid-career researcher research publication excellence: Catarina Moreira
Since completing her PhD in 2017, Dr Catarina Moreira has achieved an exceptional standard of research excellence. Amongst other achievements, she has:
- authored 20 journal papers in leading international journals
- published nine papers in Q1 journals and A-ranked conferences this year
- achieved a h-index of 11 and 385 citations
- won a $10K Women in Research Grant to study persuasion in the context of explainable AI
- been appointed as Associate Editor for the Q1 Springer Nature Journal for the section: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for BioInformatics
- presented as a keynote speaker in seven international virtual conferences and webinars in 2020, addressing topics including deep learning technologies for COVID-19, deep learning with Python, explainability, and quantum-like Bayesian inference technologies.