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About the authors

Ross Sparks is a Statistician with over 39 years research and teaching experience at universities and research at CSIRO. He is currently based in Data 61, CSIRO, Australia and been with CSIRO for over 27 years. His role is in leading strategic and tactical research projects in Data 61, CSIRO in the area of multivariate spatio-temporal monitoring and spatio-temporal modeling. He has published over 100 papers in refereed journals, 11 book chapters, 20 papers in conference proceedings and 10 articles in trade magazines. While working at CSIRO, he has carried out research contract work for most Australian large companies and several international companies operating within Australia. Ross has lectured at the University of Natal, University of Cape Town and University of Wollongong in Statistics and Applied Mathematics before joining CSIRO Australia. He has made a number of research contributions in the areas of (multivariate) process monitoring, spatio-temporal modeling and the handling of (partially) missing data. Specifically, he has contributed to topics in the variable selection in multivariate regression models, outlier detection in regression models, model validation and assessment, quality control and assurance, cluster analysis, dimension reduction methods and disease surveillance.

Brian Jin is a senior software engineer with CSIRO Data61. He started his career as a software engineer at Samsung in 2001 after completing a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at University of Seoul. His major role at Samsung was designing and developing the application framework for finance systems, then migrated to Australia with his family. His recent applications and research interest focus on scalable database, real-time processing, data integration, and web systems and natural language processing applied to social media content.

Sarvnaz Karimi is a senior researcher with expertise in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. In 2012, she joined CSIRO where she started working in CSIRO language technology team as well as collaborating with researchers in eHealth program. Sarvnaz has been serving as chair, area-chair, and programme committee member of a number of local and international conferences in NLP and IR, including ALTA, ADCS, SIGIR, CIKM, and ACL. She has also served as reviewer of a number of journals including ACM Computing Surveys, Artificial Intelligence for Medicine, BMC medical informatics and decision making, Language Resources and Evaluation, and Information Processing & Management. Sarvnaz's formal background is in Computer Science and Software Engineering. She completed a PhD degree in Natural Language Processing, specifically on machine transliteration in 2008.

Cecile Paris is a Science Leader at Data61, CSIRO. Her expertise is in Natural Language Processing, User Modelling, Social Media Analytics, and, more generally, in artificial intelligence and communication. She seeks to understand how people communicate and to facilitate communication with information environments. With a Bachelor Degree from the University of Berkeley (California) and a PhD from Columbia University (New York), she has over to 25 years of experience in research and research management. Her group develops systems that are being used in government and industry, in numerous domains, including service delivery, digital libraries, health, business intelligence and media monitoring. Dr. Paris is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE).

C. R. MacIntyre is Professor of Global Biosecurity and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow at the Kirby Institute, UNSW, and an adjunct professor at Arizona State University. She is a specialist physician with a masters and PhD in epidemiology. She leads a research program in control and prevention of infectious diseases, spanning epidemiology, risk analysis, vaccinology, bioterrorism, mathematical modelling, public health and clinical trials. She has over 350 peer reviewed publications and sits on several expert committees and editorial boards. Her awards including the Sir Henry Wellcome Medal and Prize from the Association of Military Surgeons of the US for her work on bioterrorism, the PHAA Immunisation Achievement Award, The CAPHIA Research Award and the Frank Fenner Award. She has pioneered concepts of biological threat detection using cross-disciplinary methods. Her current research focuses on vaccines (including smallpox), emerging infections, personal protective equipment, aerosol dynamics, dispersion of respiratory pathogens, and bioterrorism detection and prevention.