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Shane Culpepper is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. Before joining the University of Queensland in 2023, Professor Culpeper held a continuing academic position at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Melbourn in 2008. His research focuses primarily on building better Search and Recommendation Systems. Over his 16 year career, Professor Culpepper has supervised 19 PhD students and co-authored more than 120 peer reviewed papers with 127 different research collaborators on problems such as algorithm efficiency and scalability, new machine learning algorithms for search and recommendation systems, and evaluating search and recommendation engine quality. Professor Culpepper is also an active member in the international research community. In the last 5 years, he has been a program co-chair for international conferences such as SIGIR and CIKM, and co-organized conferences such as WSDM and SWIRL. Professor Culpepper previously held an ARC DECRA fellowship in 2013 as well as an RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Princpal Researcher fellowship in 2017. Before joining the University of Queensland. Professor Culpepper was the founding director of the Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics at RMIT University. In total, he has been a chief investigator on 11 reseach grants totalling ~$3.5 Million AUD. For more information, see his personal hoomepage.

I am a computational biologist with a centre-wide research role in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture, based here at UQ. I spend my time researching new computational techniques for predicting complex quantitative traits by integrating multiple layers of 'omics data (amongst dozens of other things!).

Areas of interest:

• Machine Learning, AI and high performance computing to learn and exploit functional connectivity in biological data
• Gene Expressions networks
• Multiplex networks, information propagation and perturbation
• Genomic Prediction

My goal is to aid crop and forestry breeders in selecting parental lines more accurately, which gives us a pathway to improving certain plant species. I also spend time developing new data analysis techniques that are being applied to human disease and conditions such as Autism and substance addiction.

David completed his PhD at Australian National University in 2017, focusing on the genome-wide basis of foliar terpene variation in Eucalyptus. He then undertook a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Dept of Energy lab with a focus on big data. After a stint as a staff scientist at Oak Ridge, David arrived at the Centre of Excellence in 2023 in the role of a Senior Research Fellow.

Research interest: Monitoring ecosystem health of coral reefs and seagrass habitats, integrating field and remote sensing image datasets, and the developing applied cost-effective mapping and monitoring approaches. Developed approaches have been adopted as standard practice globally, making a difference in conservation of these valuable habitats. The long term monitoring studies at Heron and Moreton Bay formed the basis for the development of mapping and monitoring over time and space at local to global scale.

Current projects:

1) Long term monitoring of benthic composition at Heron Reef (2002-ongoing). Annual photoquadrate surveys are being collected at Heron Reef, Southern Great Barrier Reef. Initiated to develop remote sensing mapping approaches and assess coral composition over time. The resulting Maps, photo quadrate and benthic data, spectral reflectance are accessible online.

2) Long term monitoring of seagrass composition and abundance in Moreton bay Marine Park (2000-ongoing). For Eastern Banks it included monitoring seagrass species, cover and biomass 15x times since 2004 using photoquadrate survey and satelite imagery and for Moreton Bay it included seagrass extent and cover (2004, 2009, 2015, 2021, 2022), all data accessible via Moreton Bay Research Station.

3) Smart Sat CRC Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Seagrass and Coral Reefs 2023-2027. Collaborative effort with CSIRO, Adelaide University, DES Adelaide Coastal Waters.

4) 3D GBR Habitat Mapping Project 2015 - ongoing: Mapping and monitoring geomorphic zonation, bottom type and predicted coral type habitat for every Great Barrier Reef within the Marine Park.

5) Global habitat mapping project 2019-2023 Developed and implemention of global habitat mapping as part of the Allen Coral Atlas resulting in extent, geomorphic and benthic maps for reefs globally, funded through with Vulcan Philanthropies in partnership with; Planet; the Arizona State University and the National Geographic Society.

Other projects: Advisor for Reef Cloud Australian Institute of Marine Science and Coordinated Global Research Assessment of Seagrass System (C-GRASS).

Current position: Associate Professior in Marine Remote Sensing. Academic Director Heron Island Research Station and affiliated researchers with Centre for Marine Science and Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science

Capacity building: under/post graduate courses; Msc/PhD supervision, workshops/courses; Remote Sensing Educational Toolkit, and online courses (e.g. TNC)

Citizen science: Strong supporter of citizen science based projects, as trainer, organiser and advisor for Reef Check Australia, CoralWatch, Great Reef Census and UniDive.

Janet Wiles is a Professor in Human Centred Computing at the University of Queensland and leads the Future Technologies Thread of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL).

Her multidisciplinary team co-designs language technologies to support people living with dementia and their carers and social robots for applications in health, education, and neuroscience.

She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Sydney, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology. She has 30 years’ experience in research and teaching in machine learning, artificial intelligence, bio-inspired computation, complex systems, visualisation, language technologies and social robotics, leading teams that span engineering, humanities, social sciences and neuroscience. She currently teaches a cross disciplinary course ”Voyages in Language Technologies” that introduces computing students to the diversity of the worlds Indigenous and non-Indigenous languages, and state-of-the-art tools for deep learning and other analysis techniques for working with language data.

Featured projects

• Human-centred AI
• Florence communication technology
• For more on Human Centred Computing see the HCC projects page