Professor in AI, School of Computing and Information
Systems
Deputy Dean (Research), Faculty of Engineering and
Information Technology
The University of Melbourne,
Australia
I research AI safety, spanning the security and privacy of AI, as a Professor and Deputy Dean (Research) at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Engineering & IT. Prior to returning to academia in 2013, I enjoyed four years in industry research labs including Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and IBM Research Australia, and previously received the PhD (Computer Science) from UC Berkeley in 2010. I have been part of teams that have: analysed privacy at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Australia Bank, and Transport for NSW; robustness of translation systems to data poisoning attacks with Facebook (Meta); helped identify and plug side-channel attacks against the Firefox browser; deanonymised Victorian Myki transport data and an unprecedented Australian Medicare data release, prompting introduction of the Re-identification Offence Bill 2016; developed scalable Bayesian approaches to record linkage tested by U.S. Census; and shipped production systems for record linkage in Microsoft’s Bing and the Xbox360. Since joining Melbourne in 2013, I have been awarded $10.94m in competitive funding ($7.45m as lead) to my institution. Over 2021-24, I was co-lead of CATCH MURI, convening a team of 16 experts across 6 US/AUS universities for fundamental discovery in robust human-AI teams for cybersecurity. I have been a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences NCICS, Computing @ Go8, and the Kingston AI Group.