dicta dstg workshop

A/Prof Karim Seghouane is currently a faculty member of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that he was with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the same university. His research interests are in the areas of statistical signal and image processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is currently an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Computational Imaging Technical Committee (CITC) and serves as a Senior Editor Area on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Dr Tan Cao Tri-Tan Van Cao graduated from Flinders University, South Australia, with a Bachelor of Science (1996), a Bachelor of Biomedical Engineering (1997), and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (2002) specialising in the design of non-linear control systems. He has been with the Defence Science and Technology Group since 2002 right after he completed his Ph.D., working in the fields of Radar Signal Processing, Radar Detection, Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging, and application of machine learning in maritime object detection.

Connor Luckett graduated from Flinders University, South Australia with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Physics in 2018. He started working at the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) as a computer vision researcher in 2020. He is currently working on pre-processing and packaging complex valued Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for detection problems. His interests include processing SAR imagery, dictionary learning and multi-label learning.

Dr Sebastien Wong’s interests include strategy, leadership, entrepreneurship, computer vision, machine learning and novel computing architectures. Sebastien is the Group Leader for Automated Imagery Analysis at DSTG. He is also an advisory board member for FinTech startup Sherlok. 

Previously, Sebastien was the Director of Machine Learning and the Chief Technology Officer of Consilium Technology, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of South Australia. Sebastien holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems Engineering (with honours) from Curtin University, a master’s degree in Electronic Systems Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science, both from the University of South Australia, a graduate diploma in Scientific Leadership from the University of Melbourne, and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Sebastien has received numerous accolades over his career spanning industries from Defence to Agriculture. This includes GAIA, a multi-award winning AgTech product for mapping and monitoring the world’s high-value crops, which has been used to map all Australian vineyards.  Sebastien is passionate about leveraging applied research to bring innovative technology solutions to customers.

Ritwik Gupta is the Technical Director for Autonomy at the Defense Innovation Unit within the US Department of Defense. He is also a second year Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley focused on AI for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR), and the policy surrounding safe and effective use of this dual-use technology. His research on exploiting multi-modal satellite imagery to understand building damage after disasters, shine a light on illegal fishing operations, and aid first responders in evacuating in complex situations has been deployed worldwide by hundreds of agencies and governments such as CAL FIRE, the United Nations, the Red Cross, and more.

Prior to starting his Ph.D., Ritwik led a research lab at Carnegie Mellon University focused on AI for HADR. Working with the White House, he helped launch the national AI for HADR public-private partnership. Ritwik has also enjoyed stints in industry, such as at Apple as an EPM leading AI/ML efforts for their AR/VR organization.

Prof Antonio Robles-Kelly is a Scientific Advisor with the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG). Prior to joining DSTG, he held a Professorial Chair at Deakin, where he also served as the Associate Head of School of IT (Research). He has also held Senior Researcher positions at Data61 and NICTA, been a Visiting Scientist at CSIRO Astronomy and Space and a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He is an associate editor of the Pattern Recognition Journal, a Senior Member of the IEEE and been a technical committee member of several mainstream computer vision and pattern recognition conferences.