ACEMS Recognition Awards
ACEMS members receive a great deal of recognition for their work by organisations outside of the Centre. While this is very significant, our Centre recognises the importance of also highlighting and celebrating the work and achievements of its own members internally.
At the ACEMS 2020 virtual retreat, Centre Director Peter Taylor virtually presented the following awards to ACEMS members:
Impact and Engagement Award (individual): Dr Paul Wu
Paul was recognised for his outstanding leadership, engagement and impact in two fields in 2020: environmental monitoring of seagrass and sports analytics. In each of these areas, he has initiated and led multi-disciplinary, high profile multi-organisational and multi-national consortia of researchers and practitioners to progress mathematical and statistical modelling. Results of this work have been embedded in industry management practice. Paul has actively promoted ACEMS in all of his efforts.
Driven by data podcast here
Dr Paul Wu
Impact and Engagement Award (group): ACEMS members of the Water Quality Anomaly Detection team
The team is a stellar example of engagement between researchers across ACEMS nodes, ACEMS AIs in other universities, collaborators in other countries and industry affiliates. The team includes ACEMS CIs, AIs and early career researchers in mathematical and statistical modelling, computation, time series and ecology. This project focuses on the issue of detecting anomalies in high-dimensional streaming data obtained from new data sources, namely in-situ water quality monitors. The outputs will be important in the immediate area of water quality monitoring, and also in the wider research field of high-dimensional anomaly detection.
ACEMS Members of the Water Quality Anomaly Detection team are: Professor Rob Hyndman, Professor James McGree, Professor Kate Smith-Miles, Distinguished Professor Kerrie Mengersen, Dr Catherine Leigh, Dr Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi, Dr Priyanga Dilini Talagala, Dr Erin Peterson, Dr Edgar Santos-Fernandez, Dr Puwasala Gamakumara and Dr Benoit Liquet.
Sarah Belet receiving her certificate in the mail (courtesy Sarah Belet)
Outreach Participation Award Sarah Belet
Sarah has been active and engaged in many forms of outreach. She has run AMSI CHOOSEMATHS and other schools workshops over multiple years and promoted mathematics in the media. She has published articles in the ABC and The Conversation, appeared on local and national ABC radio multiple times, talked numbers on A Current Affair, and hosted an episode of the ACEMS podcast with Holly Krieger last year. This year she was the Victorian winner, and national finalist, of international science communication competition “Famelab”, which has provided her with ongoing opportunities to discuss her mathematics research on local radio.
Outreach Participation Award Jack Ford Morgan
Jack has contributed substantially to the promotion of ACEMS and its legacy through the development of tabletop games. Three games have been finalised, namely Virtual Reef Diver (to enhance engagement in conservation of the Great Barrier Reef), Sats & Stats (to enhance understanding of the use of satellite data) and Stop the Spread (to enhance understanding of epidemics in the context of covid-19). The VRD game is being distributed in shops and online, and is being embedded into the high school curriculum. Jack has actively engaged community and school groups in playing these games, thereby increasing awareness of the impact of mathematics and statistics. He has further games in development.
Jack Ford Morgan
Four individual Outstanding Achievements Recognition Awards
Dr Melissa (Mel) Humphries (Adelaide): Mel was recognized by ACEMS for her outstanding contributions to the Adelaide Node since she joined ACEMS. In particular, Mel has made a very significant contribution to the node's culture and has demonstrated great energy in pursuing a number of external collaborations.
Covid clues dirty water data podcast here
Dr Xuhui Fan (UNSW): Xuhui Fan was recognized by ACEMS for a sequence of innovative and outstanding research published in premier journals and machine learning conferences, including the development of new space-partitioning model concepts (incl. trees, forests, and batch and online algorithms), techniques and methods for Hawkes process modelling, new structures for modelling relational data (smoothing graphons and recurrent Dirichlet belief networks), and many others.
Dr Bonsoo Koo (Monash): ACEMS recognised Bonsoo for his research productivity and impact in the areas of econometric and statistical theory as well as financial econometrics and quantitative finance. His contributions to these disciplines include, proposing a novel method for pricing financial assets, providing an array of novel methods for forecasting economic and financial variables and establishing new theories for the estimation of and inference for high-dimensional models and their statistical properties. He has had papers published in some top journals and collaborated with industry partners Challenger Ltd, Betashares and CSIRO.
Dr David Warne (QUT): David has made outstanding contributions to two areas in 2020. The first area is in modelling global spatio-temporal patterns of covid-19 cases, as part of an international research team. David led this work and its submission as a journal article. The work has resulted in two new avenues of research with national and international partners. The second area is in modelling resilience of coral reefs, in collaboration with ACEMS Partner Organisation, AIMS. In addition to maintaining a positive and effective relationship with AIMS, David has initiated engagement with a range of other ACEMS members to enhance this research.
