Helen Allison
Education and Training Sub-committee
Helen Allison is a dynamic Education and Outreach Officer with over 6 years of experience in higher education. She is a passionate careers educator who enjoys working with students to develop lifelong skills for successful careers. Her keen interest in the development of PhD students has led her to work on numerous projects aimed at enhancing their skills and employability. Helen thrives on helping students articulate their experience in a meaningful way and enjoys empowering them to make informed choices about their future. She is committed to promoting science education through outreach activities and has worked on many programs and projects towards this goal.
Hritika Gupta
Education and Training Sub-committee
Hritika is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. She is working with our industry partner ProbeGroup, supervised by OPTIMA CIs Prof Peter Taylor and Dr Mark Fackrell. Her research interests are in applied probability and stochastic modelling. Her PhD project is based on Call Centres as an application of queueing theory.
Dr Jessica Leung
Education and Training Sub-committee
Jessica is a lecturer in Business Analytics at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University. Her research interests are optimization and machine learning methods in business analytics applications.
Dr Mario Andrés Muñoz
Education and Training Sub-committee
Dr Mario Andrés Muñoz’s research focuses primarily on understanding what makes a problem easy or hard for an optimization or machine learning method, through scientific experimentation, visualization, predictive modelling, and statistical inference techniques. With a keen interest in interdisciplinary work, he has published in fields as diverse as Biomechanics, Power Networks, Resources Engineering, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Computational Biology. He received his PhD from The University of Melbourne in 2014. Prior to joining OPTIMA, he was a Research Fellow at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne. He has published over 50 papers, including 20 articles in leading journals, and currently co-supervises five PhD students. He is the main developer of the MATILDA computational engine for Instance Space Analysis.
Dr Wathsala Karunarathne
Education and Training Sub-committee
Wathsala Karunarathne received her PhD from the University of Melbourne, where she was a student member of OPTIMA and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS). Her research interests include stochastic modelling, optimisation, data-driven queueing challenges, and pattern question answering. Wathsala’s thesis was titled ‘Scheduling in Queueing Systems,’ which was supervised by OPTIMA CIs Professor Peter Taylor and Dr. Mark Fackrell. After completing her PhD, she joined the Teletraffic Research Centre (TRC) at the University of Adelaide as a Research Associate. There, she works on several projects on optimal cutting problems, time series forecasting, and pattern question answering problems with leading industry partners.
Dr Hadi Akbarzadeh Khorshidi
Education and Training Sub-committee
Hadi is a Senior Research Fellow in Cancer Health Services Research group and an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. He has extensive research experiences in optimisation, machine learning, dynamic simulation, healthcare research, and uncertainty. He completed his PhD at Monash University in Applied and Computational Mathematics where he developed mathematical models for optimisation and simulation under uncertainty. Hadi has been funded by NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation (ACI) on “Frailty Dynamic Simulation Modelling” project. He is a CI in a joint research grant between the Universities of Melbourne and Manchester called “FinTech and Financial Crimes: Methods, Applications, and Regulations”. Also, he is a lead CI in a WEHI Collaborative Research Agreement for “Health economic analysis of performing Whole Genome Sequencing of rare cancers”. Hadi works with OPTIMA CI Professor Uwe Aickelin.
Professor Mark Fackrell
Education and Training Sub-committee
Mark is a senior lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Melbourne. His research interests include stochastic modelling, queueing theory, matrix-analytic methods, stochastic optimisation, game theory, operations research, machine learning, and healthcare modelling. He also has research links with a number of industries including Red Cross Lifeblood, DST, and Northern Health.
Professor Adrian Pearce
Education and Training Sub-committee
Adrian researches automated planning and scheduling, and he has contributed to research on reasoning about actions within artificial intelligence. His research has improved the efficiency and robustness of a range of applications, including production scheduling, trusted autonomous systems for cognitive robotics, supply chain management, logistics and air traffic management. Adrian has made fundamental breakthroughs with his colleagues, which facilitate collaborative constraint and resource optimisation for autonomous systems and over complex supply chain networks. This involves satisfying constraints, such as resource or processing capacities, while meeting temporally extended goals, such as maintenance constraints.
Adrian is the theme leader in the research theme UPTAKE
Professor Andreas Ernst
Education and Training Sub-committee
Andreas has worked in real-world applications of optimisation for over 25 years, including in supply chains, logistics, mining, services (rostering) and energy. Recent work includes rail planning and scheduling for Pacific National through a Linkage grant and methods using machine learning to improve the performance of optimisation algorithms as part of a ARC Discovery Project with RMIT. Andreas is a Senior Fellow with the Australia Indonesia Centre leading the research on Transport and Logistics in the PAIR program. His research is focused on methods for solving large-scale integer programming problems, including decomposition methods and matheuristics that combine mathematical programming approaches with metaheuristic search.
Andreas is the joint lead in the research theme ADVANCE
Professor Peter Stuckey
Education and Training Sub-committee
Peter Stuckey from Monash University has a world-leading research program in constraint programming. He led the G12 project, one of the largest projects at NICTA, peaking at 25 researchers, culminating in the Opturion spinout company, delivering optimisation solutions to commercial customers. He has been involved in 3 ARC Linkage Projects and other industry contract research projects, working in Energy, Security, Resources and Transport. His research expertise in optimisation broadly covers modelling languages and model transformation, solving using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) technology, and using machine learning methods in concert with optimisation. For the global influence and uptake of his research, he was awarded the 2010 Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science and honoured in 2019 with a Fellowship of the prestigious Association for AI Advancement.