Professor Geoff Webb is the Director of the Monash University Centre for Data Science. He was editor-in-chief of the premier data mining journal, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery from 2005 to 2014. He has been Program Committee Chair of the two top data mining conferences, ACM SIGKDD and IEEE ICDM, as well as General Chair of ICDM. He is a Technical Advisor to BigML Inc, who have incorporating his best of class association discovery software, Magnum Opus, as a core component of their cloud based Machine Learning service. He developed many of the key mechanisms of support-confidence association discovery in the late 1980s. His OPUS search algorithm remains the state-of-the-art in rule search. He pioneered multiple research areas as diverse as black-box user modelling, interactive data analytics and statistically-sound pattern discovery. He has developed many best-of-class machine learning algorithms that are widely deployed. Professor Webb recently won the 2017 Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science in recognition of his research project investigating unification of discriminative and generative approaches to machine learning. Click here to see an announcement on the award and find a short video on his work. Continue…

Nita describes herself as the black sheep of her family. While her family studied biology and medicine, she showed no interest. While growing up, if she cut herself, her sisters would want to closely examine it and look inside. She could never understand why they wanted to look inside; she just wanted to make it heal faster.  Her parents always said she thought like an engineer, trying to improve everything. With a lot of hard work and encouragement from her parents, her path was set to become one. Continue…

IEEE Computer Society DVP Speaker Professor Geoff Webb, Monash University, was awarded 2017 Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science by the Australian Museum. The Eureka prizes are annual Australian science prizes awarded in the fields of scientific research & innovation, science leadership, science communication & journalism, and school science. Continue…