Invited Speaker

Dr. Ahmed Mourad

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Information Engineering Lab (ielab), University of Queensland. My current research focuses on Conversational Systems in the context of Agricultural domain. AgAsk is a conversational agent that will provide access to agricultural R&D output (which is currently locked away into project reports, communications and scientific publications) leading directly to better, data-driven growing decisions. Through machine learning driven question-answering systems, AgAsk will elicit and understand growers information needs and preferences, providing contextualised access to insights in agricultural R&D.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at RMIT University in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Mark Sanderson, Professor Falk Scholer and Associate Professor Walid Magdy. My research focused on the Influence of geographic biases on geolocation prediction in Twitter. Before the PhD, I worked as a Research Assistant at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) focusing on Information Retrieval and Sentiment Analysis on Arabic datasets. I also worked as a Software Engineer at large corporates including Microsoft and Mentor Siemens.

Prof. Chuan-Kai Yang, Ph.D.

Prof. Chuan-Kai Yang, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Stony Brook University, USA, in 2002, and his M.S. and B.S. degree in computer science and in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1993 and 1991, respectively. He served as the chairman for the department of information management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, from 2017 to 2019,  and is currently a Professor in the department. His research interests include computer graphics, scientific visualization, multimedia systems, and computational geometry. He has published over hundreds of research papers, including more than 30 SCI journal papers and more than 40 international conference papers.

Dr. Anton van der Vegt

Anton completed his PhD in Information Retrieval from The University of Queensland, co-sponsored by CSIRO.  His reserach investigated the impact of time and knowledge constraints on the ability of clinicians to make high quality clinical decisions in the context of using a search engine to support this task. Anton proposed a minimal interaction framework, as an alternative to the traditional SERP (Search Engine Results Page) approach to clinical search. As a result of his research, numerous papers have been published in high ranking journals such as JASIST, JMLA and JDOC.  

 Prior to his PhD studies, Anton spent four years working in the UK, supporting the implementation of the National Programme for IT into the NHS; this included development and installation of clinical and administrative software systems to connect patient care across the UK. Through this work he developed a much better understanding of the unique challenges faced by clinicians and public healthcare organisations when implementing such systems. This experience, together with his thesis research informs his current role as PostDoctoral Research Fellow with EMPOWER, a Joint Venture between Queensland Health and the University of Queensland.  The purpose of this JV is to create a scalable platform for clinicians to access intelligent information to improve clinical outcomes across Queensland.