Prof. Mohammed Bennamoun received his Master’s degree from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada in the area of Control Theory; he received his PhD from Queen’s /Q.U.T in Brisbane, Australia in the area of Computer Vision. He lectured Robotics at Queen’s University and then joined QUT in 1993 as an Associate Lecturer. He then became a Lecturer in 1996 and a Senior Lecturer in 1998 at QUT. He is currently a Winthrop Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and is a Researcher of computer vision, machine/deep learning, robotics, and signal/speech processing. He published more than 200 journals and over 260 conference publications. His areas of interest include computer vision (particularly 3D), e.g., object recognition and biometrics; machine/deep learning; robotics (e.g., obstacle avoidance and robot grasping); signal/image processing; control theory. He was awarded more than 80 competitive research grants (more than AUD 35 million in funding) from the Australian Research Council and numerous other government, UWA, and industry research grants. He served for two terms (three years each term) on the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts and the 2018 ARC Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). He is currently a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.
Prof. David Edwards gained an Honours degree in Agricultural Science from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge. He has held positions within academia, government, and industry in the UK, Canada, and Australia. In 2015, he moved to the University of Western Australia as a Professor in Plant Genomics and in 2022 established the Centre for Applied Bioinformatics, supporting the continued growth of Bioinformatics across agricultural, environmental, and biomedical disciplines. He is one of Australia’s leading bioinformatics researchers and has been recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate each year since 2019. His research interests include the structure and expression of plant genomes, the discovery and application of genome variation, and the use of artificial intelligence to understand traits, with a focus on crop plants and accelerating crop improvement in the face of climate change.
