2021 Invited Speakers

Winner, CORE John Makepeace Bennett Award for the Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation

Dr Oana Balmau
Oana Balmau is an Assistant Professor at McGill University. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Sydney, advised by Prof. Willy Zwaenepoel. She earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland. Her research interests are computer systems and storage technologies. Currently, she is focusing on redesigning edge storage systems, persistent memory technologies, and their role in the way we manage large-scale data for Internet of Things workloads. (Homepage: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~balmau/ )

Winner, CORE Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research Contribution

A/Professor Zhifeng Bao
Associate Professor Bao has made groundbreaking contributions in the area of large-scale spatial data management, mining and retrieval. In these different areas, he developed novel query models, robust algorithms, visual analytic processes and systems that deliver insights to non-technical decision makers and benefits to society. His research applies directly to transportation optimization, advertisement placement, and search query answering about road networks

Winner CORE Teaching Award

A/Professor Julia Prior
Associate Professor Prior is a passionate teacher of software development and innovation to students in engineering, information technology and multidisciplinary courses. She created and coordinates the Software Development Studio, which simulates a professional software development setting, embedded in a supportive and scaffolded learning environment. Over the last six years, 365 students have participated in this studio. Her teaching approach strongly encourages self-directed, active and collaborative learning in environments that provide deliberate scaffolding and support to students. She explicitly enables active industry engagement in the students’ learning experiences, and considers mentoring to be an essential part of students’ learning and development. She has completed several funded research projects on teaching and learning innovation, making a sustained contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning in the computing and software engineering fields.

Invited Keynote Speaker

Professor Ryan Ko
Professor Ryan Ko is Chair and Director of UQ Cyber Security at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also Discipline Leader of the Cyber Security and Software Engineering Discipline at the School of ITEE at UQ. His applied research in cyber security focuses on 'returning control of data to cloud computing users'. His research reduces users' reliance on trusting third-parties and focusses on (1) provenance logging and reconstruction, traceability and (2) privacy-preserving data processing (homomorphic encryption). Both his research foci are recognised nationally and internationally, receiving conference Best Paper Awards (2011, 2015, 2017), and technology transfers locally and internationally.

Invited Keynote Speaker

Professor James Noble
James Noble is Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Victoria University New Zealand. He is the author of Small Memory Systems: Patterns for Systems with Limited Memory (with Charles Weir), the editor of Prototype-Based Programming and Pattern Languages of Program Design 5 (with various co-editors). He has published many papers on object-orientation design patterns, aspects, software visualisation and software engineering in international academic conferences and journals.