People | UTS:CIC

Academic Team

Simon Buckingham Shum

Director &
Professor of Learning Informatics

“Liminal Space… when you have left the tried and true but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run… anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.” – Richard Rohr

Ruth Deakin Crick

Visiting Professor of Learning Analytics & Educational Leadership

“Scaffolding a learning journey when the outcome isn’t known in advance is the big challenge for educators in the 21st Century.”

Kirsty Kitto

Associate Professior (Data Science)

“I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” – Richard Feynman

Lisa-Angelique Lim

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John Wooden

Alireza Ahadi

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” – Albert Camus

Doctoral Candidates

Sophie Abel

PhD Student

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” – Jack Kerouac

Gloria Fernandez Nieto

PhD Student

“If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But by all means, keep moving. ” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Aleksandr Gromov

PhD Student

“That’s mortals for you. They’ve only got a few years in this world and they spend them all making things complicated for themselves. Fascinating. ” – Death

Leonie Payne

PhD Student

“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind” – Johannes Brahms

Ben Hicks

PhD Student

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong” – (common paraphrasing of) H.L. Mencken

Professional Team

Gabrielle Gardiner

Senior Manager

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?” – Winnie The Pooh

Max Kulinich

Data Scientist

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
– Nelson Mandela

Andrey Inkin

Full Stack Developer

“Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
– The King of Hearts

Joseph Jung

Front End Developer

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
– Steve Jobs

Georgia Markakis

Business Development Manager

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” – Marcus Aurelius

Ran Ding

Administrative Assistant

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”- Albus Dumbledore

Alumni

Ágnes Sándor

Adjunct Fellow

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Theresa Anderson

MDSI Coordinator & Associate Professor

“Harnessing imagination and intuition alongside high-powered computational and analytical capacities is the way to generate inventive and value-sensitive data insights.”

Simon Knight

Research Fellow (Writing Analytics)

“Thinking about how we find and evidence knowledge is what drives my research.”

Andrew Gibson

Research Fellow (Reflective Writing Analytics)

“Exploring the boundary between the human and machine worlds, and making “the best of the ignorance that one chances to be in” – John Woods

Kailash Awati

Senior Lecturer

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of data, decisions and algorithms—
Of multiple meanings…”

Michael Pracy

Data Scientist

“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”
– Carl Friedrich Gauss

Ming Liu

Research Fellow (Educational Data Science)

“The goal of innovation isn’t how to change education, but how education can change the world.” -Nathan Lang, Ed.D.

Ratha Ang

Administration Assistant

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.”
– Marcus Aurelius

Jack Schmidt

Marketing Officer

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
— Rachel Carson

Michelle Gubanyi

Marketing Officer

“Less is more. Keeping it simple takes time and effort” – Jeff Bullas

Roberto Maldonado Martinez

Research Fellow (Educational Data Science)

“Data storytelling is the bridge between humans and data science. What is more human than art and telling stories?”

Shibani Antonette

PhD Student (Learning Analytics)

“It’s not about the technology, but how it impacts educational practice.”

Carlos Prieto

PhD Student (Learning Analytics)

“I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”- Thomas Edison

Vanessa Echeverria Barzola

PhD Student

“True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” – Daniel Kahneman

Radhika Mogarkar

Applications Developer

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Leonardo da Vinci

Andrei Maslennikov

CIC Programmer

“The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Mahesh Jeshani

UI/ UX Developer

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
– Steve Jobs

Rianne

PhD Endeavour Scholar

“In a world full of data, it is incredibly inspiring and also necessary to collect, analyze, interpret, and utilize these data with humans in the loop.”

Bikalpa

PhD Endeavour Scholar

“Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying” – Red (Shawshank)