Futoon Abushaqra

ARC Centre of Excellence for ADM+S

Futoon is a researcher at the Australian Internet Observatory. Futoon holds a PhD in Computer Science from RMIT University, Australia, where she developed deep learning methodologies for sequence data modelling. Her broader research spans AI, machine learning, temporal data analytics, emotion recognition, audio analysis, and natural language processing.

Daniel Angus

QUT Digital Media Research Centre

Daniel is Professor of Digital Communication and Director of the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT. A Chief Investigator in ADM+S, he develops computational methods—including visualisation, NLP, and topic modelling—for studying communication, media, and digital platforms.

Olga Boichak

University of Sydney

Olga is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures and Founder of the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Sydney. She studies networks, narratives, and cultures of activism, developing computational tools for large-scale analysis of online communication.

Dominique Carlon

Swinburne University of Technology

Dominique is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow whose work focuses on the societal and cultural impacts of AI, human-machine dynamics, and developing frameworks for inclusive AI futures in Australia. Her interdisciplinary research examines how communities negotiate, shape, and contest emerging technologies, drawing on digital ethnography to analyze the roles of bots and automated communication platforms..

Kunal Chand

QUT Digital Media Research Centre

Kunal is a research fellow conducting large-scale image analysis and machine vision techniques for qualitative and quantitative social science, including tools for clustering visually similar images and identifying patterns in visual culture.

Ehsan Dehghan

Queensland University of Technology

Ehsan is a Senior Lecturer and researcher whose work investigates the intersection of digital media, political communication, and discourse theory. His research focuses on the dynamics of digitally mediated political struggles, analysing phenomena such as polarization, antagonism, and misinformation across mainstream and fringe social media platforms.

Kim Doyle

University of Melbourne

Kim is a Research Data Specialist at the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) and a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her interdisciplinary research operates at the intersection of political communication, computational linguistics, and text-as-data methodologies, leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze social media discourse, data journalism, and digital political campaigns.

Oliver Eklund

RMIT University

Oliver is a Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University, specializing in media public policy across television, screen, and emerging digital formats. Drawing on his background as a former public servant for the Australian Government's media reform agenda, his research examines how legacy policy and regulatory frameworks can be updated to navigate the disruptions faced by consumers and industries in the modern digital media economy.

Michael Esteban

ARC Centre of Excellence for ADM+S

Michael is a Senior Software Developer at the Australian Internet Observatory. He works on data donation and participant-centred approaches to accessing digital trace data, including data download packages and tools.

Laura Gartry

RMIT/ ADM+S

Laura is a PhD researcher at RMIT and Newsroom Innovation Lead at ABC News. As a former investigative digital producer for ABC's Four Corners, she specialised in creative, inclusive, and long-form storytelling. Following her Reuters Journalism Fellowship at the University of Oxford—where she researched editorial algorithms and public-interest journalism—her current work operates at the intersection of technology and media, guiding newsrooms to adopt emerging formats and AI responsibly.

Lauren Hayden

ARC Centre of Excellence for ADM+S

Lauren is a research Fellow and communications researcher at the University of Queensland's Centre for Digital Cultures & Societies. Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media, platform consumer cultures, and automated decision-making.

Indigo Holcombe-James

ACMI

Indigo is Head of Research at ACMI—Australia's national museum of screen culture. Working through ethnographic methods mixed with statistics, she examines qualitative research in cultural institutions and the boundary between academic and audience-centred practice.

Kateryna Kasianenko

ARC Centre of Excellence for ADM+S, QUT

Kateryna is a Research Fellow at ADM+S, QUT. Her work examines how search practices and interfaces shape real-world events and partisanship, using LLM-based discourse modelling, network analysis, and practice mapping.

Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam

GESIS, Germany

Ahrabhi a Postdoctoral Research Associate at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany, working within the Computational Social Science department and the Transparent Social Analytics team. Her research operates at the intersection of political communication and computational methods, specifically focusing on social bias, automated racism detection, and the dynamics of polarization and migration in mediated and parliamentary discourses.

Hiruni Kegalle

University of Melbourne

Hiruni is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne's School of Social and Political Sciences. She focuses on using ubiquitous computing, multi-modal sensing, and value-sensitive design to understand interactions between vulnerable road users—such as pedestrians and cyclists—and emerging micro-mobility technologies like e-scooters.

Ariel Kuperman

Industry

Ariel is a Data Scientist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where his work operates at the intersection of public-service journalism, data science, and AI. With a background in physics and extensive experience deploying scalable machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, he focuses on developing data-driven products and collaboration models that align technical capabilities with editorial goals to personalize the news responsibly.

Seraphine F. Maerz

University of Melbourne

Seraphine is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science (Research Methods) at the University of Melbourne whose work focuses on the comparative study of democracy, authoritarianism, and regime transformation. Her research leverages computational social science, quantitative text analysis, and open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to examine the language of political leaders, digital authoritarianism, and the impacts of AI on democratic governance.

Andrew McMahon

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Andrew McMahon is the Program Manager for Data Science and Emerging Methods at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, where he leads the development of new statistical solutions, big data integration, and AI methodologies.

Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal

RMIT University

Sachin is a computer science researcher and data scientist specializing in Information Retrieval. His research focuses on developing and evaluating knowledge-augmented Conversational AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, with a particular emphasis on ensuring the fair dissemination of multiple perspectives in intelligent question-answering systems.

Sonia Ramza

Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)

Sonia is a user support manager, responsible for user experience and providing training and support to researchers using the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud.

Daniel Russo-Batterham

University of Melbourne

Daniel is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne's School of Computing and Information Systems. Working within the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP), his transdisciplinary research applies data science, quantitative methods, natural language processing, and advanced data visualization to digital humanities projects, with a particular expertise in computational musicology.

Richard Sinnott

University of Melbourne

Richard is a Professor of Applied Computing Systems and the Director of E-Research at the University of Melbourne's School of Computing and Information Systems. His research focuses on large-scale distributed systems, IT security, and big data architectures, leading an extensive portfolio of multidisciplinary projects that apply advanced software engineering to areas like clinical trials, epidemiology, and urban systems.

Dan Tran

ARC Centre of Excellence for ADM+S

Dan is a Software Developer at the Australian Internet Observatory, where he applies his computer science expertise to support research in computational social science. He develops digital tools that enable the management, visualisation, and analysis of collected data.

Johanne Trippas

RMIT University

Johanne is a Senior Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at RMIT University's School of Computing Technologies. Her research operates at the intersection of conversational systems, interactive information retrieval, and human-computer interaction, focusing on developing next-generation intelligent voice assistants and spoken search interfaces to improve information accessibility.

Kellie Vella

ARC Centre of Excellence for ADM+S

Kellie is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland's Centre for Digital Cultures & Societies and the Australian Internet Observatory. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), exploring how digital systems and ambient technologies can be designed to foster social connectedness, support digital wellbeing, and connect children and older adults with outdoor environments.

Svetha Venkatesh

Deakin University

Svetha is a Deakin Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative (A2I2) at Deakin University. Her pioneering research focuses on statistical machine learning, pattern recognition, and Bayesian optimization, translating complex computational frameworks into real-world applications across large-scale surveillance, health analytics, and early intervention tech for autism.

Matteo Vergani

Deakin University

Matteo is Associate Professor in Sociology at Deakin University and Director of the Tackling Hate Lab. He combines social science and data science to study prejudice, hate crime, extremism, and rigorous validation in computational social science.

Stephen Wan

Industry

Stephen is a Team Leader and Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO’s Data61, where his work operates at the intersection of computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and domain-specific science applications. With over 20 years of research experience and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from Macquarie University, he focuses on deploying natural language processing (NLP), text mining, and machine learning pipelines to extract actionable insights from complex text data.

Oleg Zendel

RMIT University

Oleg is a Research Fellow at RMIT University's node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). His research focuses on information retrieval (IR), where he explores query performance prediction, search system pipelines, and user behavior analysis to optimize system performance and improve user experience.