An excerpt from the International Women's Day 2022 website:
Celebrate women's achievement. Raise awareness against bias. Take action for equality.
One of the most impactful ways groups can mark International Women's Day is by championing their own IWD campaign within their community. Whether deliberate or unconscious, bias makes it difficult for women to move ahead. Knowing that bias exists isn’t enough, action is needed to level the playing field.
Together we can forge women's equality. Collectively we can all #BreakTheBias.
To celebrate International Women's Day 2022, we will be highlighting the profiles of several EMCRs across our ITEE disciplines and interdisciplinary research initiatives. We aim to celebrate their achievements and contributions while recognising that there is still more to be done to achieve gender equality.
Cyber security and software engineering: Dr Abigail Koay
Dr Abigail Koay is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include applied machine learning, cyber security and critical infrastructure security. Originally from Malaysia, Abigail pursued her university studies in the area of computer systems and networking, a study field which isn’t typically well represented by female students in her home country.
Upon graduation and working in the industry for several years, Abigail immigrated to New Zealand to pursue her PhD at the Victoria University of Wellington. In 2021, she relocated to Brisbane and has been an active contributor to the cyber security and software engineering discipline. Amongst her latest achievement is a Defence Science and Technology Group grant which she received last year.
Data Science: Dr Yadan Luo
Dr Yadan Luo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include domain adaptation, few-shot learning in computer vision and multimedia data analysis. She has been awarded Google PhD Fellowship In 2020, and WiT (Women In Technology Inc.) ICT Young Achiever's Award winner in 2018 under the supervision of Professor Helen Huang.
She has led multiple AI-oriented collaborative projects with local governments and industries. 'RoadAtlas' - the derived vision-based road defect analysis system has been adopted by the team at Logan City Council, a snippet of her work can be found here.
Human-Centred Computing: Dr Jess Korte
Dr Jess Korte is an Advance Queensland TAS Defence CRC Fellow based at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Jess is passionate about the ways good technology can improve lives. In her work, Jess advocates involving end users in the design process; especially when those people belong to “difficult” user groups – a term which usually translates to “minority” user groups.
Her fellowship was awarded to create an Auslan Communication Technologies Pipeline, a modular, AI-based Auslan-in, Auslan-out system capable of recognising, processing and producing Auslan signing. Jess recently blogged about her work here. Jess’s example of working with members of marginalised groups in the design of new technologies is an awesome example of breaking the bias.
Imaging, Sensing and Biomedical Engineering: Dr Tina Xiaoqiong Qi
Dr Tina Xiaoqiong Qi is an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellow based at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include terahertz sensing and imaging, laser dynamics in semiconductor lasers.
Tina joined the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering through The University of Queensland Fellowship in 2015; In 2017, Tina was awarded the Advance Queensland Maternity academic funding scheme; in 2020, Tina was a recipient of mid-career Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship. Her fellowship was awarded to develop terahertz imaging technology for skin cancer detection and investigate the contrast mechanisms in terahertz images for skin cancer, through close collaboration with the PA hospital and industry.
Power, Energy and Control Engineering: Dr Feifei Bai
Dr Feifei Bai is an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellow based at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include renewable energy integration, PMU applications in smart grid, power system oscillation detection & damping control and energy storage for frequency control. She is also an active representative of the Women in Power (WiP) special interest group for the IEEE PES Queensland Section. Originally from China, Feifei has also lived and studied at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (USA) for PhD research.
In 2020, one of the projects Feifei is involved with as a lead researcher received an Australian Engineering Excellence Award. In 2021, Feifei was a recipient of the UQ Amplify Women's Academic Research Equity (AWARE) Program.
UQ AI Collaboratory: Dr Alina Bialkowski
Dr Alina Bialkowski is a Lecturer in Computer Science based at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. She specialises in computer vision and machine learning. Her research interests include quantifying and extracting actionable knowledge from data to solve real-world problems and giving human understanding to AI models through feature visualisation and attribution methods.
Alina plays an integral role within the UQ AI Collaboratory and is the Student Experience lead within this hub. Alina has been leading the student internship program as part of the Student Experience initiative within UQ AI Collaboratory. To-date, she has successfully coordinated the 2021 UQ-wide Workshop on Artificial Intelligence as well as the inaugural AI Showcase event. In addition to high impact journals and conferences, her work has resulted in 6 international patents filed with Disney Research, Toyota Motor Europe, University College London, and The University of Queensland.
CIRES: PhD candidate, Daisy Xu
Ms Daisy Xu was recently recruited as a PhD candidate within CIRES, one of many interdisciplinary research initiatives led by the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Her research interest sits within the areas of context data monetization and data science.
A seasoned business analytics professional and management consultant, Daisy was also a Founder & CEO of a boutique consultancy which provides software programs for organisations to fast assess their workforce productivity. Daisy is a UQ MBA alumna and looks forward to her PhD journey with the CIRES team.
