ATSE Victoria Division New Fellows Forum

“Warning for Epidemic Thunderstorm Asthma in Victoria”

Dr Beth Ebert is a Senior Principal Research Scientist and Team leader, Forecast Quality at the Bureau of Meteorology. Prior to that she managed the Weather and Environmental Prediction research program in the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, with staff from both the Bureau and CSIRO.

Beth has a long-standing interest in forecast verification and evaluation, developing novel object-based and neighbourhood-based approaches for verifying high resolution weather forecasts. From 2008 to 2014 she chaired a Joint Working Group on Forecast Verification Research with the World Meteorological Organization and the World Weather Research Programme. She is now leading another four-year international project on Value Chain Approaches to Evaluate the End-to-End Warning Chain.

Beth works at the nexus of weather and health, contributing to the development of new forecast services for heatwaves, smoke, and pollen. In 2017 she was part of a cross-disciplinary team that developed the world’s first early warning system for thunderstorm asthma.

She joined the Bureau of Meteorology in 1989 after completing her PhD in Atmospheric Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“The Evolution of Optical Wireless Communications and Computing”

Prof Thas Nirmalathas is Deputy Dean Research in the University of Melbourne Faculty of Engineering and IT, and Research Chair and Board Director at the Oceania Cyber Security Centre.

His research interests include microwave photonics, optical-wireless network integration, broadband networks, photonic reservoir and edge computing, and scalability of telecom and Internet services.

Earlier in Prof Nirmalathas’ career he was Director of the Melbourne Node of the Photonics CRC and Research Group Manager of the Networked Systems Group in NICTA’s Victoria Research Laboratory.

His next step at University of Melbourne was promoting to Head, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and in 2012 he co-founded MAP – the Melbourne Accelerator Program to support the university’s entrepreneurs through business acceleration programs. He was the director of MAP until 2015, and then moved to the new role of Director of the Networked Society Institute. The Institute was created as a catalyst for interdisciplinary research tackling societal challenges and understanding the connectivity between people, places and things.

Professor Nirmalathas is also Chair of IEEE Photonics Society’s Future Technologies Task Force.

“Using Artificial Intelligence to Support Complex Problem Solving”

Prof Ann Nicholson is Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.

After completing her BSc (Hons) and MSc in Computer Science at the University of Melbourne, Ann was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford – where she completed her doctorate in the Robotics Research Group. After a post-doc at Brown University she returned to Australia to take up a lecturing position at Monash, and since then she has progressed through a range of senior roles in the University.

Prof Nicholson specialises in the broad area of Artificial Intelligence, a sub-discipline of computer science. She is a leading international researcher in the specialised area of Bayesian networks, now the dominant technology for probabilistic causal modelling in intelligent systems.

She has applied Bayesian Network technology to problem-solving in many domains including meteorology, epidemiology, medicine, education and environmental science. Specific examples include biosecurity risk assessments, predicting the impact of conservation actions on threats and habitats of threatened species, fog forecasting and decision support for clinical cardiovascular risk assessment.