Adelaide Program – 24 June 2021

Mike Barber, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Cyber Collaboration Centre, Cyber Awareness and Resilience for SME’s and the role of A3C

Protecting your business and your customers information is critical to survival in the digital economy. Every organisation is at risk and the cost to the economy is enormous. Protecting your business from cyber threats can be described as “it is not if, it is when!” SME’s will often ask – where do I start? There are many tools and resources available along with Government initiatives to help combat these threats. There is also a shortage of cyber security workers in Australia today,. It is estimated that this shortage is approximately 16,000 workers. The Australian Cyber Collaboration Centre (A3C) was established in 2020 to help build cyber awareness and resilience in Australian corporates, SME’s, Government and Defence. The A3C is a member based Not-for-profit organisation helping business to launch new cyber products and services to global markets, providing access to cyber courses, solving real world cyber challenges through collaboration and building cyber awareness and resilience along the value chain.

Dr Simon Barry, CSIRO’s Data61

• Dr Dale A. Lambert PSM, Chief of Cyber and Electronic Warfare Division in the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group, Australian Department of Defence; Autonomous Cyber
  

The Industrial Age operated with a 2-tiers, human environments and physical industrial environments in which people directly controlled their industrial machines. The current Information Age now operates with a 3-tiered arrangement in which human environments interface to information environments that in turn interface to physical environments. As a consequence people no longer directly control their physical environments. They instead issue commands to information environments and those information environments directly control the physical environments. Indeed society now has a total reliance on information environments to the point that they directly influence and sometime control the human, information and physical environments of others. If you can control a society’s information environments, then you can control that society. This has ushered in a new era of Information Warfare in which warfare is now being conducted inside of the information environments to effect the human, information and physical environments of others. As Information Warfare matures this will increasingly become a contest between Artificial Intelligence systems in which we effectively have digital soldiers in digital armies inside information environments. Artificial Intelligence needs to progress to meet this challenge.

• Dr Jason Signolet, Senior Data Scientist, Fivecast Ltd. Pty. ; OSINT for understanding foreign influence

The ability to monitor and assess public attitudes is an operational and strategic necessity for any public facing organization. Opinions for and against entities and institutions flow freely through social media. Left alone, popular opinions get shared, unpopular opinions get swept under the rug, and consensus, be it transient and unstable or “common sense” and long-lived, can form organically. However, this dynamic is open to abuse from actors who wish to manipulate such public opinion via online influence operations. In this presentation I will talk about: 

• The importance of understanding online narratives including how adversarial entities may attempt to manipulate them via influence operations 

• The challenges inherent in using data from the Surface, Deep and Dark Web to monitor and analyse online conversations 
• The application of advanced open-source intelligence (OSINT) technology for understanding foreign influence 

• Dr Murli Viswanathan, Associate Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon University; Machine Learning Challenges for Common Cybersecurity Use Cases

• Dr Trent Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University; AI for Enhancing Workflow through Predictive Analytics 

Industry processes are generating large volumes of data.  These processes might be capturing the manufacturing of components or the movement of patients through a hospital.  Techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be leverage to understand the data and potentially enhance these processes or workflow: AI for Enhancing Workflow through Predictive Analytics.  This work cannot be performed in silos and requires expertise from many disciplines.  This presentation will overview several projects where AI is being used to investigate data from medical domains and how the results will benefit end-users.

• Dr Sanjay Mazumdar, Partner and Chief Data Officer, KPMG Australia, Achieving trustworthy AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the competitive landscape across all sectors of the economy, bringing significant business and societal benefits as well as emerging risks to people. Research by the University of Queensland and KPMG shows that trust in AI is currently low in countries such as United States, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom and Australia. Without ensuring public trust in AI systems, their widespread acceptance and adoption will be hindered, and the potentially vast societal and economic benefits will not be fully realised. This presentation will provide an overview of some of the key findings of this research and propose a model to design, manage and use trustworthy AI systems to enable the long-term value of AI to be realised and captured. 

• Professor Trish Williams, CISCO Chair & Professor of Digital Health Systems, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University at Tonsley, Cybersecurity in healthcare: old problem, new challenges

The increased dependency on technology and information, coupled with a growing attack surface, makes healthcare one of the biggest targets for cyberattacks as well as information security mistakes. In 2021 we have new challenges to old problems in how to protect healthcare, ensure patient safety and make cybersecurity an enabler of safe clinical care. 

• Dr Grant Osborne, Principal Engineer – AIML; Becoming an AI organisation – principles and best-practices. 

Before an organisation can begin to increase their AI maturity, they must commit to improving many core values. Only then can they successfully drive significant business value from machine learning. In this talk I’ll walk though some organisational alignment, team structures, and core activities that I’ve seen help companies develop significant AI skills and capabilities.

• Dr Wolfgang Mayer, Senior Lecturer, University of South Australia, Artificial Intelligence for Digital Twins

Digital Twins have become prominent aids for decision-making in many application domains. This talk will examine the mutual relationship between Artificial Intelligence technologies and Digital Twins and highlight the work being undertaken at the Industrial A.I. Research Centre at the University of South Australia and its partners.

Panel Session South Australia SME Cyber Uplift Pilot project – Cyber Security Journeys

Facilitator: Ms Anne-Louise Brown, Director of Corporate Affairs and Policy, Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre

Panel Members:

• Nadia Makovec, Operations and Communications Manager, Australian Medical Placements  
• Michael Jones, CEO, TurbAero  
• Dr Vinay Sriram, General Manager (Engineering), IPACS Australia  
• Andrew McDonnell, IT Manager & Senior Embedded & Security Engineer, Solinnov (VC)  
• Paul Kemp, Director – Governance, Risk and Compliance (SA & NT), CyberCX

• Dr Jessica Bohorquez, Postdoctoral researcher. School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, The University of Adelaide; Using Artificial Intelligence for water pipeline inspection. Where water meets technology. 

Pipelines are key to provide drinking water. However, pipes monitoring and maintenance are often complicated because they are buried underground. Fluid transient waves have been used for assessing and monitoring the condition of pipelines to detect the presence of anomalies (e.g. leaks, blockages) and the occurrence of abnormal events (e.g. bursts). Nonetheless, existing techniques require information in regards to the properties of the pipe (model-based techniques) or imply a large processing time to obtain results. Artificial intelligence algorithms have proven to have significant potential in complementing existing techniques with the development of data-based pipeline inspection techniques. This talk will present techniques that combine transient pressure waves and custom-designed Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for the active and passive inspection of water pipelines. A second application of the use of artificial intelligence for de detection of cracks in pipelines using acoustic methods is presented to highlight how AI can support the operation of essential services such as water supply.   

• Ms Priscilla Hennekam, Wine specialist, Hennekam Wines Consultancy, Business Director at InnVernia Winery, How AI and Cyber can impact the Wine industry 

The wine industry is constantly facing new challenges, and AI and cyber offer unique solutions to help both wineries and consumers. In this presentation I will show how new technologies are being used to tackle the following problems:

• • • Water shortages in the face of heatwaves, plus longer and more frequent droughts due to climate change;
    • Proving the authenticity of wines to combat wine counterfeiting, which costs the industry billions; and
    • Finding new markets in the digital world, and data analytics to guide business decisions and customer interactions.

AI and Cyber for Immersive and Hybrid Analytics

• Dr Andrew Cunningham, Lecturer, UniSA, From Visualisation to Immersive Analytics: Opportunities for AI

Immersive analytics—using immersive technologies to visualise and support analytical reasoning through interaction—is becoming a prominent area in human-computer interaction research. This talk will present the visualisation and immersive analytics work being undertaken within the Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments, and will present the opportunities where AI could contribute to area.