2024 Pearcey Medal awarded to A2I2's Deakin Distinguished Professor Svetha Venkatesh

Summary

• Deakin Distinguished Professor Svetha Venkatesh is Co-director of Deakin's Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute and one of the top 15 women in the world in artificial intelligence.
• The annual Pearcey Medal recognises a distinguished lifetime of achievement and contribution to the Australian information and communications technology industry.
• The winner of the medal is chosen each year by their peers in a nationwide vote.

Deakin Distinguished Professor Svetha Venkatesh, co-Director of Deakin University's Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A2I2) has been awarded the 2024 Pearcey Medal.

The Medal, awarded annually by the Pearcey Foundation, recognises a distinguished lifetime of achievement and contribution to the development and growth of the Australian information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

The winner of the medal is chosen each year by their peers in a nationwide vote.

Professor Venkatesh is a pioneering Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur who has made fundamental and influential contributions to the field of pattern recognition in multimedia data. She is among the top 15 women in the world in artificial intelligence (AI) and in 2018 was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate, Australia's most prestigious scientific award, for her world-leading expertise in pattern recognition and 'sample-efficient' AI. Her body of work includes publications, patents, tools and spin-off companies such as the ASX-listed software company icenta AI.

'Svetha's contribution to the field of AI over almost 30 years cannot be overstated. Her work has directly benefited the community by providing innovative solutions to issues such as mental health, autism, security and aged care,' says Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Innovation Deakin Distinguished Professor Matthew Clarke.

Professor Venkatesh's research involves building new AI frameworks and developing sample-efficient algorithms to accelerate exploration in other fields, including working with the Black Dog Institute to accelerate trials of personalised mental health treatments for students, accelerating the composition and processing of new alloys with metallurgists at Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials and working with Deakin's Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) in using AI to help GPs pinpoint effective ways to encourage patients with obesity to increase their physical activity. She has also been working for over a decade with the Cerebral Palsy Alliance to develop AI for early detection of cerebral palsy.

In accepting the award, Professor Venkatesh thanked the Board and the national and state committees of the Pearcey Foundation for nominating her and those who voted to give her 'this great honour'. She also thanked her many collaborators from multiple disciplines.

'I started in this field called pattern recognition almost 30 years ago and the name evolved to computer vision and then machine learning and then finally what is now known as AI,' she said.

'It's been a wonderful experience working with so many collaborators across disciplines to not only advance machine learning, but also their fields.'

Professor Venkatesh with some of the team at A2I2: (L-R) Associate Professor Santu Rana, Dr Simon Parker, Professor Truyen Tran, Professor Sunil Gupta and Associate Professor Shannon Ryan.

Pearcey Foundation chair, Wayne Fitzsimmons OAM congratulated Professor Venkatesh on her accolade.

'Professor Svetha Venkatesh isn't just one of the world's leading artificial intelligence experts; her lifetime of work in AI has had a profound impact in multiple fields. In addition, her role as an educator and mentor has contributed towards generational talent and innovation in AI here in Australia and internationally,' says Fitzsimmons.

As well as receiving the Pearcy Medal, Professor Venkatesh was also inducted into the Pearcey Hall of Fame, along with the University of New South Wales' Professor Andrew Dzurak and Jan Kornweibel, mentor and trainer at the Autism Academy for Software Quality Assurance (AASQA).

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