Professor Svetha Venkatesh

Professor Svetha Venkatesh

Plenary 2:
The man machine interface – machine learning, AI, implants…how far will it go? (11:30am, Tuesday November 14th)

Director, Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics (PRaDA) at Deakin University

Svetha Venkatesh is Alfred Deakin Professor and Director of Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics (PRaDA) at Deakin University. She was elected a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2004 for contributions to formulation and extraction of semantics in multimedia data, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 2006.

Professor Venkatesh and her team have tackled a wide range of problems of societal significance, including the critical areas of autism, security and aged care. The outcomes have impacted the community and evolved into publications, patents, tools and spin-off companies. This includes 544 publications, 3 full patents, 3 start-up companies (iCetana.com, Virtual Observer.com, iHosp) and a significant product (TOBY Playpad).

Professor Venkatesh has tackled complex pattern recognition tasks by drawing inspiration and models from widely diverse disciplines, integrating them into rigorous computational models and innovative algorithms. Her main contributions have been in the development of theoretical frameworks and novel applications for analyzing large scale, multimedia data. This includes development of several Bayesian parametric and non-parametric models, solving fundamental problems in processing multiple channel, multi-modal temporal and spatial data.