Invited Speakers

Professor Karin Verspoor is Executive Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. Karin’s research primarily focuses on the use of artificial intelligence methods to enable biological discovery and clinical decision support, through extraction of information from clinical texts and the biomedical literature and machine learning-based modelling. Karin held previous posts as Director of Health Technologies and Deputy Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as the Scientific Director of Health and Life Sciences at NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory, in the Computational Bioscience program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She also spent 5 years in start-ups during the US Tech bubble, where she helped design an early artificial intelligence system.
Tim Bell is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa (New Zealand). His main research interest is computer science education, which he has been involved in for over three decades. His “Computer Science Unplugged” project, which introduces students and teachers to computer science without using computers, is widely used internationally.
Dr. James Curran is the CEO of Grok Academy, a charity that combines Grok Learning and the Australian Computing Academy from the University of Sydney, where James was an Associate Professor in Computer Science. Grok Academy’s mission is to educate all learners in transformative computing skills, knowledge, and dispositions, empowering them to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the future. James is Director of the National Computer Science School, the largest computer science school outreach program in Australia. Last year, over 22,500 students and teachers participate in the 5-week NCSS Challenge. James was a writer on the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies and consults with curriculum authorities around Australia. In 2014, James was named ICT Leader of the Year by the ICT Educators of NSW and the Australian Council for Computers in Education.
Dr David Chen is a senior lecture in the School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He obtained his PhD from the same school in collaborative distributed systems in 2002. Dr Chen has a keen interest in IT, especially in software development as he believes the only limitation to what computer software can do are people’s imagination. Dr Chen has been teaching IT at the tertiary level for 20 years, and has taught from large first year courses to small postgraduate courses in software development and network areas. He has developed his unique style of teaching software development courses based on flipped class and peer review, and utilising software development environment on the cloud.
Natasha is a postdoctoral researcher in cybersecurity at Macquarie University. Her research interests include differential privacy, privacy-preserving natural language processing and quantitative information flow for security and privacy. Natasha received her undergraduate degree from Sydney University in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, and recently completed a cotutelle PhD in Computing with Macquarie University and Ecole Polytechnique in France. Her PhD focussed on information flow techniques for analysing differential privacy guarantees, and introduced new methods for reasoning about privacy for natural language processing using a metric-based version of differential privacy. Natasha's current work is on metric-based reasoning for privacy-preserving natural language processing and machine learning.
Nengkun Yu is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Quantum Software and Information, University of Technology Sydney. He received his B.S. and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in July of 2008 and 2013. He won many awards, including the Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research, J G Russell Award, ACM SIGPLAN distinguished paper award at OOPSLA 2020, and ACM SIGPLAN distinguished paper award at PLDI 2021. His research interest focuses on quantum computing.
Giuliano Casale joined the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in 2010, where he is currently a Reader. Previously, he worked as a research scientist and consultant in the capacity planning industry. He teaches and does research in performance engineering and cloud computing, topics on which he has published more than 150 refereed papers. He has served on the technical program committee of over 100 conferences and workshops and as co-chair for several conferences in the area of performance and reliability engineering, such as ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance and IEEE/IFIP DSN. His research work has received multiple recognitions, recently the best paper award at ACM SIGMETRICS. He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE TNSM and ACM TOMPECS and as current chair of ACM SIGMETRICS.
Anthony Maeder holds a PhD in Software Engineering from Monash University and a MSc in Parallel Computing from University of Natal in South Africa. His initial career was in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, until he transitioned to Health Informatics in 2004 as the inaugural Research Director of the CSIRO Australian eHealth Research Centre. He served on the Standards Australia Health Informatics Technical Committee from 2006 and represented Australia in this area at the International Standards Organisation. He subsequently moved to Western Sydney University in 2008 as Professor of Health Informatics, where he founded the Telehealth Research and Innovation Laboratory. He was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair Fellowship to Kansas State University on the topic of Health Behaviour Change in 2015. In 2016 he was appointed Premier’s Research Fellow and Professor in Digital Health Systems at Flinders University to establish the Flinders Digital Health Research Centre there, which he co-Directed until his retirement in 2021.