School of Computer Science

Dr. Husam Al-Najjar is a Lecturer and Researcher (Asst. Prof.) and serves as Course Director of the Bachelor of Information Systems at the School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He specialises in Information Systems, spatial decision support systems, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) and automated workflows for climate-induced natural-hazard modelling, translating cutting-edge research into practical solutions for business intelligence, smart-city development, and disaster resilience.

His research advances spatial information systems and AI-powered algorithms—including machine learning, optimization techniques, and large language models (LLMs)—to accelerate decision-making and enhance public safety through scalable, explainable, and innovative methods. He contributes to this, for instance, by developing novel computational approaches that enable first responders and agencies (such as insurance companies) to rapidly assess the impacts of natural disasters—streamlining operations, reducing costs, and delivering faster, more targeted support to the most at-risk communities.

He earned his PhD from UTS, and his research is widely published in high-impact Q1 journals. Recognitions include the Best Paper Award at ISPRS Geospatial Week (Enschede, Netherlands, 2019), Highly Cited Papers acknowledgments in 2021 and 2023 (Clarivate, 2025), and CSIRO program funding (2025) for advancing code-free development platforms in higher education. These initiatives strengthen digital capabilities, support scalable learning, and create enduring competitive advantages for both learners and institutions.

He collaborates with leading institutions across Europe, the USA, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea, advancing international knowledge exchange in smart-city technologies and hazard-modelling algorithms. At UTS, he coordinates and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programs and supervises Honours, Master’s and PhD students, preparing the next generation of professionals for AI-driven digital transformation.

He is active in academic leadership, chairing multiple sessions at IEEE IGARSS—the flagship annual global event for scientists and professionals in geospatial technology. He also serves on the committees of the Australian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) and the International Conference on Information Systems Education and Research (ICISER), Nashville, USA, and is a member of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Society and UNSW-UTS Trustworthy Digital Society. These roles underscore his expertise and leadership in advancing algorithmic innovation to address global challenges.

≡ Prospective PhD candidates are invited to email Husam.Al-Najjar@uts.edu.au with a CV and a research proposal outlining the study’s novelty, main contribution, and significance.

• For more information regarding the eligibility criteria, visit here
• For general scholarship information and application deadlines, visit here
• Learn more about funding types on our funding page. Click here

Nada Alghanmi is an accomplished researcher, educator, and software development professional with a wealth of experience in academia and industry. She is currently pursuing a PhD focused on using provenance mechanisms to ensure the authenticity of carbon credits in agricultural projects to mitigate climate change. Her expertise spans web application development, project management, cybersecurity, and teaching, with a strong commitment to innovation and sustainability.

Aiden Alp is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney. His doctoral research develops compliance-mapped assurance and governance frameworks for agentic AI in Australian healthcare cybersecurity, asking a question that regulation has not yet caught up with: when an AI system plans, decides and acts on its own, what evidence does it have to leave behind for an auditor, a clinician or a board to hold it to account?

That question comes out of two decades of doing the work. From 2017 to 2024 he was Cyber Security Manager at NSW Health's Sydney Local Health District, where he built the security architecture protecting more than 14,000 staff and seven million patient records, chaired governance committees, and led risk assessment across more than fifty clinical technology projects. Earlier roles took him from university network and systems engineering to industrial control systems at a petrochemical joint venture in Iran, where he led the response to the Stuxnet worm — an early lesson in what happens when software reaches into the physical world.

He is now Chief Information Security Officer at CySO, leading ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 assurance programmes and designing governance for AI systems in regulated environments.

Aiden holds an Executive MBA from AGSM at UNSW, an MSc in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a BSc in Computer Engineering. He is a CISSP and a certified ISO/IEC 27001 lead auditor. He speaks regularly on AI governance and healthcare cybersecurity, including a session at CyberCon 2026 in Melbourne on 21 CFR Part 11 and compliance for Australian biomedical businesses.

Mada Altiary has a strong foundation in mathematics, which has developed her logical and critical thinking as well as advanced problem-solving skills through three years of research experience in Canada. Her PhD focuses on applied artificial intelligence, with current research on explainable AI for forecasting, using large language models to provide natural-language decision support and improve the interpretability of model outputs in environmental and economic applications such as carbon prices. She is also interested in mathematical reasoning, intelligent learning technologies, and AI methods for addressing complex real-world challenges.

Dr Afshin Asadi is a Fellow of the UK Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), a Chartered Professional Engineer, and a Chartered Member of Engineering New Zealand. He is currently Principal Design Engineer (Geotechnical) at Total Ground Engineering (Auckland, New Zealand), Research Director at EnvoGéotechnique Ltd, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Dr Asadi holds a PhD in Geotechnical Engineering (2010), following a BEng in Civil Engineering and an MSc in Civil–Geoenvironmental Engineering. He later pursued postdoctoral research in sustainable geotechnics. His academic appointments have included Senior Research Fellow (Grade UDQ9, Associate Professor level) at the Housing Research Centre, Universiti Putra Malaysia, and Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader at the International College of Auckland.

He is a co-author of Geotechnics of Organic Soils and Peat (CRC Press, 2016) and associate author of Environmental Geotechnology: Meeting Challenges Through Needs-Based Instrumentation (World Scientific, 2022).

Dr Asadi has received several prestigious international fellowships, including the Australia Awards Endeavour Fellowship (University of Wollongong), the JSPS Invitation Fellowship (Hokkaido University, Japan), and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research Fellowship (Experienced category) in sustainable geotechnics.

He has proudly served as a reviewer and editorial board member for many of the leading international journals in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering over the past two decades. His reviewer acknowledgements span Géotechnique, Géotechnique Letters, Ground Improvement, Geotechnical Engineering, Environmental Geotechnics, Geotechnical Research, and key ASCE journals such as the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering and the Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering. He has also reviewed extensively for Geotechnical and Geological Engineering (Springer) and the Journal of Rock Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (Elsevier).

In recognition of these contributions, he served on the editorial boards of Environmental Geotechnics (ICE Publishing, since 2013, with an advisory role from 2022), the ICE Civil Engineering journal (since 2022), and formerly the International Journal of Geosynthetics and Ground Engineering (Springer, 2017–2022).

Dr Asadi has also contributed to the advancement of global research through expert evaluation roles. He proudly served as an evaluator for the HORIZON-MSCA-PF-2022 call, assessing proposals supporting frontier research and career development under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. In 2025, he was honoured to evaluate a project under the EIC Transition programme, part of Horizon Europe, which supports the maturation and commercialisation of breakthrough technologies. These roles reflect his ongoing commitment to fostering innovation, excellence, and impact in the global research landscape.

Latifah Asiri is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and a lecturer in Information Technology at Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. Her research focuses on Web Intelligence and intelligent web services, with an emphasis on AI-driven, QoS-aware service composition and optimisation in fog-IoT and cloud environments. She holds a MSc from Michigan University, USA, and a BSc from King Khalid University (KKU), Saudi Arabia. She is the author of a cloud computing book chapter, the inventor of an AI-enabled system for automated meeting-minutes generation, and the first-place winner of the WISE Hackathon on maximising research outcomes of women in STEM, held at Western Sydney University in collaboration with AMSI.

Dr Amara Atif is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Associate Professor in North America and European academic systems) in the School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. A teacher at heart, a Learning Sciences researcher by training, and a Responsible AI advocate by passion, she provides leadership in designing intelligent, equitable and evidence-informed learning ecosystems through Human-Centred AI, Learning Analytics and Educational Innovation.

Working at the intersection of research, teaching and technology, Amara provides academic leadership in translating artificial intelligence and learning analytics into scalable educational practice that enhances student engagement, equity and success. Her interdisciplinary research spans Learning Sciences, Human-Centred AI, Human-Computer Interaction, Learning Analytics and Digital Equity, with a focus on designing intelligent educational ecosystems that support learners, educators and institutions. She teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programs, including studio-based learning environments, and is recognised for leading innovative, student-centred approaches to curriculum design and educational practice.

As Co-Director of the iDEAS Research Hub and a full member of the Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Society (CREDS), Amara leads collaborative research that advances technology-enhanced learning and responsible AI in higher education. Her research investigates learner and educator engagement with intelligent learning systems, informing the development of early alert technologies, learning analytics interventions and AI-enabled educational environments that improve student success and institutional decision-making. She also contributes to technology acceptance and information systems adoption, strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration across education and computing.

Amara has established an internationally recognised research profile through publications in leading SJR Q1 journals, including Computers & Education, Journal of Computing in Higher Education and the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. She regularly presents at internationally recognised conferences, including AMCIS, PACIS, ACIS, ASCILITE, AARE, PICMET and IEEE conferences. Beyond publishing, she contributes to advancing her discipline through editorial activities, peer review, technical program committees and special issue leadership.

An Associate Fellow of Advance HE (AFHEA) and a graduate of the UTS Teaching for Learning program, Amara demonstrates leadership in curriculum innovation. She developed the undergraduate Business Intelligence subject at UTS, embedding the Faculty's Indigenous Graduate Attribute through historically and culturally informed Indigenous knowledge systems while aligning curriculum with contemporary industry practice.

Recognised as a UTS Open Education Champion and a Creative Commons Certified educator, Amara provides institutional leadership in advancing open education and equitable access to knowledge. Her Creative Commons certification recognises her expertise in open licensing and open educational practice, complementing her work in developing and sharing Open Educational Resources (OERs) that improve learning opportunities for students and educators nationally and internationally. She is the lead author, editor and project manager of Decoding Data: A Complete Guide to Business Intelligence (UTS ePress, 2026), published through the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) OER Collective. The textbook represents a significant contribution to open scholarship by providing freely accessible, high-quality educational resources that support inclusive and sustainable learning.

Leadership and Recognition in Learning and Teaching:
Amara's sustained leadership and impact in learning and teaching have been recognised through multiple awards and recognition. Collectively, these awards acknowledge her contributions to curriculum innovation, learning analytics, open education, AI literacy, student engagement, academic support and educational transformation.

• 2026 Open Education Awards for Excellence (OEGlobal) - Nominee, Individual Award: Advancing Open Data and AI Literacy
• 2025 UTS Vice Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Team Award (Academic Support) - Empowering academics to lead inclusive, data-informed teaching.
• 2024 UTS Vice Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Highly Commended Team Award (Outstanding Contribution to Student Experience) - Fostering students' belonging in multiple disciplines through personalised feedback.

• 2022 UTS Vice Chancellor’s Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning - Recognising effective assessment practices that improve student learning through authentic assessment, meaningful feedback and academic integrity.
• 2021 UTS Vice Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Team Award (Strengthening the UTS Model of Learning) - Transforming learning in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology through studios.
• 2017 Macquarie University Vice Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Team Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning - Innovative learning analytics solution that enhances the learning and teaching student experience.
  
  

These awards demonstrate a sustained record of educational leadership and innovation spanning almost a decade, with impact extending from individual teaching practice to faculty-wide initiatives that strengthen student success and academic capability.

Institutional Leadership and Service (UTS):

Amara demonstrates sustained institutional leadership through strategic academic service, curriculum leadership and initiatives that strengthen learning, teaching and student success across UTS.

She currently serves as Major Coordinator for the Business Information Systems Management (BIS-M) major, providing academic leadership for curriculum quality, program development and the student learning experience. She has also contributed to student mentoring through the UTS Apple Foundation Program and champions equity, diversity and inclusion as an Academic Staff Ambassador for Women in Engineering and IT (WiEIT).

Her institutional leadership includes serving as FEIT First Year Experience (FFYE) Transition Coordinator (2021–2024), where she led initiatives to strengthen transition, engagement and success for first-year students across the Information Technology discipline. She also served on the Education & Students Ecosystems Alignment (E&SEA) Working Group, a strategic Faculty initiative established to shape future models of education delivery within FEIT. Through this work, she contributed to developing principles for equitable teaching workload allocation, clarifying academic leadership roles, strengthening student communication throughout the student lifecycle, and identifying opportunities for cross-school collaboration to enhance educational quality and student success. She has further supported university governance and academic quality through membership of the FEIT Board, School Teaching and Learning Committee, FEIT Academic Integrity Working Group and FEIT Health and Safety Working Group, contributing to strategic decision-making, curriculum enhancement, academic integrity and institutional effectiveness.

Beyond formal leadership roles, Amara actively builds educational capability across UTS through the FEIT Pedagogy Community, Club Studio and the Education Express Blog, where she shares evidence-informed teaching practices, supports academic colleagues and contributes to institutional conversations on educational innovation and digital learning.

National and International Academic Leadership:
Amara provides leadership within the national and international academic community through conference leadership, scholarly service, editorial contributions and professional engagement.

She currently serves as Track Co-Chair for the General Track of the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), providing academic leadership for one of Australasia's leading Information Systems conferences by overseeing the peer-review process and contributing to the quality and direction of conference scholarship.

Amara also contributes to national sector initiatives that shape the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence in higher education. She is a chief investigator on the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems (ACPHIS) Generative AI Policy Review Project, a collaborative initiative that analyses and compares generative AI policies across Australian universities to identify emerging practices and inform future policy development for Information Systems education. This work reflects her commitment to advancing responsible AI governance and evidence-informed educational policy.

Amara actively translates her research beyond academia, contributing to wider policy, sector and public conversations on responsible AI, higher education and emerging technologies. Her research and perspectives have been featured across national and international policy, media and sector platforms, including The Policymaker, The Conversation (Editor’s Choice), Times Higher Education, Campus Review, AARE EduResearch Matters and ABC News. These engagements extend the reach of her research to policy, professional and public audiences.

She is also the Early Career Researchers and Students Chair for the ACM SIGCHI Sydney Chapter, leading initiatives that strengthen the Human-Computer Interaction research community through mentoring, networking and professional development opportunities for emerging researchers.

Amara also provides international editorial leadership through appointments with leading Q1 journals. She serves on the Editorial Board of Springer Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (SJR: Q1) (2026–present) and as Special Issue Editor for Sustainability (SJR: Q1) (2025-2026), leading the special issue Advancing Sustainable Education Through AI and Technological Breakthroughs, and for Education Sciences (SJR: Q1) (2023), leading the special issue Using Learning Analytics for Personalised, Data-Informed Feedback and Support: Studies of Impact, Challenges, and Future Directions. These editorial roles reflect her expertise in artificial intelligence in education, learning analytics, educational innovation and interdisciplinary scholarship while supporting the dissemination of high-quality international research.

Her standing within the higher education sector is further recognised through invitations to evaluate excellence and innovation. She has served as a Judge for the Australian Education Awards (2022), a Judge for the Reimagine Education Awards (2021), widely regarded as the "Oscars of Education" and an Assessor for the ALTA/ACDICT Grants Scheme (2025). These appointments recognise her expertise in educational innovation, learning technologies and higher education practice while enabling her to influence the advancement of teaching and learning nationally and internationally.

Alongside these formal leadership roles, Amara contributes extensively to the advancement of her discipline through editorial service, peer review for leading journals, conference technical program committees, special issue leadership and collaborative international research networks.

Dr. Madhushi Bandara is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at University of Technology Sydney, Australia, driving teaching and innovation across artificial intelligence (AI) and software systems sectors. She joined UTS in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher after completing her PhD at UNSW in AI systems engineering and resumed the continuing academic role in 2022. Madhushi is the Course Coordinator for Master of Technology Management (UTS Online) & Master of Technology Innovation (CinLearn) programs.

Madhushi is the Co-Director of UTS DigiSAS lab, and leads the data management research stream contributing to Research & Innovation in Data-intensive Digital Ecosystems. She is a core member of Biomedical Data Science Laboratory in the UTS Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute and the convenor for Future Generation Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice (FGEA CoP) that provids a platform to EA practitioners, researchers and thought leaders from government, higher education and industry to exchange innovative ideas and best practices for architecting and building human-centric AI, data and digital ecosystems.

Madhushi has established a national reputation as an expert in knowledge representation and complex system modelling using technologies such as machine learning and knowledge graphs. She has made significant theoretical and practical contributions to the field, by bringing the advancements in state-of-art AI/ML technologies to information systems in critical sectors such as healthcare and finance through harmonising contextual domain knowledge, data science and management practices, software engineering best practices and organisation business architecture. The synergy of her research and industry needs today enable her to attract industry partners and build long-term partnerships. She has worked with industry partners including Telstra, Cancer Australia, Capsifi, LIRNEasia, Landcom NSW and Cognitivo Consulting to design and deliver knowledge representation and data analytics solutions.

Grace Billiris is a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney whose work focuses on trustworthy and responsible emerging technologies. Her research examines privacy, data and copyright risks associated with artificial intelligence, generative AI and quantum-enabled systems. She works collaboratively across disciplines to develop practical frameworks and tools that support safer technology design and governance.

Michael Blumenstein is currently a Visiting Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) where he previously served as the Pro Vice Chancellor (Business Creation and Major Facilities). Earlier, Michael served as the Acting Dean and the Deputy Dean (Research and Innovation) in the Faculty of Engineering & IT at UTS, and prior to this, he held the positions of Associate Dean (Research Strategy and Management) and Head of the School of Software (now Computer Science). Previously, Professor Blumenstein worked at Griffith University in Queensland where he accumulated over a decade of experience in leadership roles including portfolio Dean (Research) of the Sciences Group and Head of the School of ICT.

Professor Blumenstein has served in numerous leadership roles with industry and professional associations over two decades, including most recently as a Board Member of the Internet of Things Alliance Australia (IoTAA). Previously he served as Vice President (Academic) of the Australian Computer Society (ACS), and prior to that as Director of Technical Advisory Boards. Professor Blumenstein was also elected onto and served as a member on the NSW Council of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). Prior to moving to NSW, he served as the Chair of the Queensland Branch of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Computational Intelligence Society. He was also the Gold Coast Chapter Convener and a Board Member of the ACS Queensland Branch Executive Committee. He is a past Chairman of the IT Forum Gold Coast and a former Board Member of IT Queensland.

Michael has served on the Australian Research Council's (ARC) College of Experts on the Engineering, Mathematics and Informatics (EMI) panel. In addition, he also served on the Executive of the Australian Council of Deans of Information and Communication Technology (ACDICT).

Mark Bolotin is a multimedia artist, theatre director and inventor, as well as the artistic director of Synarcade Audio-Visuals and co-founder of New York art technology company Hyphen Hub. Bolotin has written and directed  large-scale interactive multimedia work across the world including the interactive theatre experience Emergence: Build Your Own Being (Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Arts House, Canberra Street Theatre) and the twelve-headed multimedia rock opera The Lumiphonic Choir (3LD New York, SXSW, Burning Man, MOMA Zagreb). He has showcased his work at TEDxSydney, served as Arts Co-Director for New York City’s inaugural Creative Tech Week and been invited as a delegate for the Future Innovators Summit at Ars Electronica, Austria. Bolotin is currently a PhD candidate in the field of emergent technology in multimedia theatre production through UTS and NIDA.

Emily Booth is a Research Fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She specialises in narratives, particularly as they manifest at part of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. This includes work funded by the Facebook Research Award, the Australian Department of Home Affairs, the Defence Innovation Network, the Australian Department of Defence, the NSW Department of Communities and Justice, and more. She has also led a series of grants including the UTS Social Impact Grant (2019), the Frances Henne Research Grant from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and a UTS Blue Sky Discovery grant (2024).

She has consulted on the BBC Documentary "Men of the Manosphere", available to watch in Australia on Stan. In 2026, Emily's paper "Conspiracy, Misinformation, Radicalisation" was integrated into the NSW Department of Education high school curriculum as part of the Respectful Relationships Education Program.

She has published widely on misinformation, conspiracy theories, and radicalisation; reading and book publishing; digital media; school education, and more. She has written for The Conversation and appeared on radio disseminating her research.

She has been a member of the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee since 2020, and was also a member of the University Student Conduct Committee (USCC) and Student Misconduct Appeals Committee (SMAC).

Her PhD research explored how teenagers respond to adult influence on their reading practices in the contexts of leisure reading, school reading, and industry engagement. Outside of academia, she worked in the publishing industry for a decade as a specialist in children's and young adult literature.

Dr Ali Braytee is a Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator of IT Short Courses & Microcredentials at the School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Ali is currently instructing micro-credentials in data analytics and has experience teaching/coordinating various data analytics and programming courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Ali completed a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and prior he holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Ali conducts research on machine learning, computer vision, and Generative AI, focusing on developing and implementing techniques to solve real-world problems in various sectors such as health, environmental engineering, and education. Ali's research findings are published in top-ranked reputable academic journals (IEEE/ACM) and conference proceedings (ERA-A). Ali (co)-developed AI solutions across diverse domains, including cancer research, vertigo detection, medical VQA, AI chatbots, telecom, agriculture, and environmental engineering, using technologies like deep learning, LLMs, RAG, and multimodality.

He is enthusiastic about leveraging advanced AI technologies to provide innovative solutions for real-world challenges in the industry, including the use of LLM, LVM, conversational AI chatbots and RAG across multiple domains. Prior to his academic pursuits, Ali led various software development projects from 2007 to 2014.