Future Students
If you are excited about leading-edge research into Human-AI collaboration, decision making, responsible and equitable business AI, strategic management, innovation, entrepreneurship, or the need for practical ethical and legal frameworks to govern AI, please explore the exciting UNSW Business School PhD program. You can reach out to me using the form at the bottom of this page.
I have supervised a wide range of diverse and talented students as Interns, Honours, Capstone and PhD students. Some have created their own successful startups companies. Others have received Oscars for the Animated film Happy Feet and taken up senior technical, management and leadership roles at: Apple Inc, Cupertino; Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle; Animal Logic, Sydney; Atlasssian, Sydney; Canon, Sydney; Bosch, Germany; Uber Advanced Technology Group (Self-driving Car Project); University of Melbourne, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Massachusetts.
Graduated PhD Students
2022
- Sarita Herse: Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) UNSW. Research topic: Trust in Human-AI Collaboration. Co-supervised with Benjamin Johnston, Jonathan Vitale and Chris Jackson.
- Sidra Alam. Undergraduate completed at CMU. Persuasion during Human-Robot Collaboration, and exploring intelligent and robust mechanisms to support human-robot collaboration.
2021
- Nikolas Dawson: is an economist working on the impact, risks and challenges of AI on individuals, business, government and civil society. Nik was awarded a research fellowship at the United Nations in Geneva as part of his PhD program in 2018. In 2020 Nik was awarded an OECD Future of Work Fellowship to continue his groundbreaking research. Co-supervised with Benjamin Johnston.
- Sammy Pfeiffer: is developing a novel and much-needed methodology for innovation competitions. Co-supervised with Xun Wang Senior Roboticist CBA Innovation Lab and Benjamin Johnston in the School of Software.
- Meg Tonkin: Customer Experience in Human-Robot Interaction: Exploring human-robot interaction and developing a new understanding of the importance of humans knowing what robots know about them as they interact. Co-supervised with Benjamin Johnston.
2020
- Suman Ojha: Ethics, Emotions and Social Robots: Exploring how to embed ethics into social robots decision making. Gained First Place in the Master of IT at The University of Sydney in 2015. Co-supervised with Benjamin Johnston.
2019
- Mark van Rijmenam: Organisations in times of disruption: Towards a data driven framework for sustained competitive advantage. Co-supervised with Jochen Schweitzer in the School of Business.
- Srinivas Madhisetty: Privacy on Social Media.
2018
- Mahya Mirzaei Poueinag: Disruptive Innovation: Integrating Business Analytics and Design Thinking. Mahya is an exceptional PhD student who came to UTS with a 99.8 ATAR and a B Aeronautical Space Engineering (Honours) from University of Sydney. Her PhD was funded by an APA with ARC Discovery and CBA Top-Ups. Mahya was awarded two IBM PhD Fellowships US$50K. She also joined Hatchery+ Program for student founders and entrepreneurs, and the UTS Launchpad Program to launch her startup Learned Hub.
- Syed Ali Raza: Learning by Human Demonstration. International Student Pakistan. Leading Software Development of the Karachi Koalas UTS-IBA Robot Soccer Team. Note: IBA was established by the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. Funded on APA and ARC Linkage Top-Up.
- Jonathan Vitale: Cognitive Robotics and Facial Recognition. International Student from University of Milan Italy. Funded on an ARC Discovery Project's UTS complimentary APA. Co-supervised with Benjamin Johnston.
2017
- Wei Wang: Social Network for Robots to Share Information and Skills. International Student China, IRS and IBM PhD Fellowship.
- Nima Ramezani Taghiabadi: Optimising Robot Motion funded on APA with CBA Top-Up. Previously working as a researcher a the German Research Institute in AI. Now working as a Senior Data Scientist at CBA.
2016
- Muhammad Anshar: Teaching Robots New Behaviours and Skills. International Student Indonesia. Funded on a 4-Year Endeavour Leadership Scholarship.
- Shaukat Abedi: Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Extensions to Maximum-Margin Structured Prediction: ARC funded scholarship and project focused on machine learning techniques for recognizing human actions from a single photograph or robot image. Gained an exciting post-doc position in machine learning.
2015
- Rony Novianto: Attention-based Cognitive Architecture funded on an ARC Discovery Project. Received an Endeavour Fellowship to work at Lund University Sweden 2011, and an IBM PhD Fellowship 2012.
- Shan Chen: Privacy and Personal Information Management funded on an APA and ARC Discovery Project. Received an Endeavour Fellowship to work at Indiana University at Bloomington USA 2012.
2014
- Edward Wei: Learning How to Make Good Decisions: co-supervised with Professor Jordan Louviere, School of Business UTS. Senior researcher at UTS.
2013
- Xun Wang: An Innovative Framework for Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Management funded on an ARC Discovery Project. Received IBM PhD Fellowship 2010-2011. UTS Chancellor's Post-Doc. Social Roboticist CBA.
2012
- Jebrin Sharawneh: Recommendation in Social Networks funded on an APA. Received a Best Paper Award at a top-tier conference in Information Systems. Currently, developing a Start-Up based on a recommender system he developed for his PhD.
2011
- Benjamin Johnston: Commonsense Reasoning. First Class Honours & University Medal, University of Queensland. Won 2011 UTS Chancellor's Award for the Best PhD Dissertation. Nominated to ACM Best Dissertation. Won the Kurzweil Prize for Most Creative Idea in Artificial Intelligence 2011. UTS Chancellor's Post-Doc 2012 - 2015. Senior Lecturer, School of Software UTS, leading entrepreneurship.
2009
- Muh Anshar: High Performance Robot Motion: Master of Science (International Student). Funded on an Endeavour Scholarship. Returned to undertake a PhD in 2012.
2008
- Christopher Stanton: Grounding Robot Representations. First Class Honours, Dean's Medal University of Newcastle. Funded on a Faculty Scholarship. Current position at WSU.
2006
- Numi Tran: Agent-Oriented System Design Methodology. (First Class Honours and University Medal University of Newcastle). Data Scientist at IBM.
2004
- Suku Sinna: A New Approach to Marketing: Classifying Customers using Conceptual Spaces. International Student. Currently, leading his own start-up.
2003
- Wei Liu: Belief Revision funded on an IPRS. Currently, Senior Lecturer at University of Western Australia.