2020 Honours and Accolades

Chief Investigator Tat-Jun Chin was named the Professorial Chair of Sentient Spacecraft by SmartSat CRC. In a $20M investment, nine professorial Chairs have been established by SmartSat to develop the next generation of space technologies to stimulate Australia’s economic growth in space. Tat-Jun will build Australia’s largest research group dedicated to AI and machine learning for space.

Chief Investigator Dana Kulić was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship for the project “Interactive learning for robots in human environments.”

Chief Investigator Stephen Gould was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship for the project “Declarative Networks: Towards Robust and Explainable Deep Learning.”

Chief Investigator Elizabeth Croft was appointed Director of the Board for the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) and Monash University Research Academy (ITTB-Monash), an Indian-Australian research partnership.

Research Fellow Yizhak Ben-Shabat has received a European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellowship for 2021-2023 and will collaborate with Professor Ayellet Tal, Technion in Israel and Chief Investigator Stephen Gould, at ANU in Australia.

Chief Investigator Niko Sünderhauf received an Amazon Research Award for the project “Learning Robotic Navigation and Interaction from Object-based Semantic Maps”. This project will investigate how graph-based maps that contain both semantic and geometric information of objects in an environment, can be utilised to learn complex robotic tasks that require navigation, exploration, and interaction with the environment.

Centre Director Peter Corke was awarded the prestigious IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation. The award recognises outstanding contributions of an individual and Peter was nominated for his foundational research on robot vision and for leadership and innovation in robotics education.

Chief Investigator Chunhua Shen was named a Research superstar in the Lifetime Achievers Leaderboard, a list of Australia’s top 40 researchers measured by their performance over their career, in The Australian 2020 Research Special Report.

Associate Investigator Liang Zeng was named one of Australia’s top 40 young researchers in the The Australian 2020 Research Special Report, Early Achievers Leaderboard. The award recognises researchers who are less than 10 years into their career and measures both productivity and impact of their publications.

Chief Investigator Hongdong Li and colleagues Dongxu Li, Cristian Rodriguez Opazo, and Xin Yu received the Best Paper Honorable Mention (Applications) Award at the 2020 Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) for their paper titled “Word-level Deep Sign Language Recognition from Video: A New Large-scale Dataset and Methods Comparison”

Associate Investigator Clinton Fookes became a member of the Pattern Recognition Journal Editorial Board.

Research Fellow Fatemeh Saleh was selected as an outstanding reviewer for the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020.

PhD Researcher Sadegh Aliakbarian received the Outstanding Reviewer Award for the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020 Conference.

Associate Investigator Hanna Kurniawati was promoted to Associate Professor at the Australian National University.

Associate Investigator Miaomiao Liu was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University.

Associate Investigator Nick Barnes was promoted to Professor at the Australian National University.

Chief Investigator Niko Sünderhauf was promoted to Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology.

Associate Investigator Thierry Peynot was promoted to Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology.

Associate Investigator Liang Zheng was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University.

Chief Investigators Peter Corke & Matt Dunbabin, and Associate Investigator Felipe Gonzalez are investigators in the Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF) project which is an Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative (SRI) announced in 2020. They will work on building the technology necessary to help preserve, model, and monitor the harsh Antarctic environment and its wildlife.

Chief Investigators Peter Corke & Matt Dunbabin, and Associate Investigator Felipe Gonzalez are investigators in the Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF) project which is an Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative (SRI) announced in 2020. They will work on building the technology necessary to help preserve, model, and monitor the harsh Antarctic environment and its wildlife.

Chief Investigators Peter Corke & Matt Dunbabin, and Associate Investigator Felipe Gonzalez are investigators in the Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF) project which is an Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative (SRI) announced in 2020. They will work on building the technology necessary to help preserve, model, and monitor the harsh Antarctic environment and its wildlife.

PhD researcher Jing Zhang and colleagues Deng-Ping Fan, Yuchao Dai, Saeed Anwar, Fatemeh Saleh, Tong Zhang, and Nick Barnes received a Best Paper Nomination for their paper “UC-Net: Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection via Conditional Variational Autoencoders” at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020 conference.

PhD researcher Dongxu Li and colleagues Xin Yu, Chenchen Xu, Lars Peterson, and Hongdong Li, received a Best Paper Nomination for their paper “Transferring Cross-domain Knowledge for Video Sign Language Recognition” at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020 conference.

Associated PhD researcher Zhiwei Xu and colleagues Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Vibhav Vineet, and Richard Hartley received a Best Student Paper Award for their paper “RANP: Resource Aware Neuron Pruning at Initialization for 3D CNNs” at the International conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2020.

Chief Investigator Rob Mahony, Associate Investigator Jochen Trumpf and colleagues Minh‐Duc Hua, Tarek Hamel, and Pascal Morin were awarded the 3rd Kimura Best Paper Award of the Asian Journal of Control for their paper “Feature-based Recursive Observer Design for Homography Estimation and its Application to Image Stabilization”.

Chief Investigator Jon Roberts is the Director of the ARC Training Centre for Collaborative Robotics in Advanced Manufacturing announced in 2020. The centre has been awarded $4.9 million for five years and will develop collaborative robotics applications that combine the strengths of humans and robots in shared work environments.

Centre Alum and PhD graduate Dana Rezazadegan was named a Superstar of STEM with Science and Technology Australia (STA). Dana is passionate about applying AI in a wide range of healthcare applications such as early-stage cancer diagnosis, digital scribe, and mental disorder recognition from social media.