Our People at School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences

Professor Simeon Simoff, Dean

Simeon’s walk of life spans across a range of fields, including computer science, creative intelligence, design computing and cognition, data science, applied mathematics and artificial intelligence (AI). He holds BSc/MSc Hons degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and PhD in Computer Science. He has had senior appointments at the École Polytechnique de l'Université de Nantes (France), the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Research of the Spanish Research Council (IIIA-CSIC), Aalborg University (Denmark), Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (Italy), University of Trento (Italy) and Middle East Technical University (Turkey).

His research has delivered practical outcomes across the fields of artificial intelligence (the ‘curious negotiator’ technology), data science (the CEDA analytics technology), human-computer systems (the form-semantics-function technology), design computing and virtual reality (the believability technology).Much of it has been supported by $8.3 millions of competitive grant funding. He has published more than 340 publications including a seminal monograph, and several edited books and has supervised over 20 PhD students. His current work is focused on interpretable machine learning, explainable AI, and the intersection of visualisation and AI. Simeon has established and led the growth of several early international conference and workshop series in data science, including the ACM SIGKDD Multimedia Data Mining workshop series and the Australasian Data Mining Conference series. He is the founding co-director of the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA), which in 2019 was acquired as a leading data-driven association by the Australian Computer Society (ACS). He regularly serves in chair or in steering/program committee roles at leading international events in the fields. He has served on review panels for several national research funding agencies across Australia and New Zealand, Europe and Asia. He served on ERA 2012 Research Evaluation Committee on Mathematics, Information and Computing Sciences.  Since 2015 he is on the editorial board of Tailor and Francis Interdisciplinary Science Reviews - a quarterly journal that aims to explore the social, philosophical and historical interrelations of the natural sciences, engineering, mathematics, medicine and technology with the social sciences, humanities and arts.

Currently Simeon is Deputy President/President Elect of the Australian Council of Deans of Information and Communications Technology (ACDICT). He serves on the ACS Technical Advisory Board (AI and Ethics Committee) and on the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (IFIP TC12). He is Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales and the Institute of Engineers Australia.

Professor Andrew Francis, Deputy Dean Professor Francis joined Western Sydney in 2000 after studying at the Universities of NSW and Sydney, and a postdoctoral position at the University of Virginia.  He began his role as Deputy Dean in 2020 after serving as Director of the Centre for Research in Mathematics and Data Science (2015-2019), and a period as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2011-2014). Professor Francis’s research is mainly in applications of discrete and combinatorial mathematics to problems in biology.  His training is in pure mathematics (specifically algebra), and the applications he works have chiefly been to phylogenetics, epidemiology, bacterial genome structure, and statistics.  In addition to his ARC Future Fellowship, he has held four ARC Discovery Projects.  He has served on the Council of the Australian Mathematical Society (2012-14), on the ARC Research Evaluation Committee for the 2015 and 2018 Excellence in Research for Australia exercises, and is currently a member of the ARC College of Experts (2018-2020).

CDMS Leadership

Key People in our School

Further contact details for School of Computing, Data and Mathematical Sciences can be found in the University Staff Profiles.

WSU Contact Email: studentcentral@westernsydney.edu.au
Domestic Contact Number:         1300 668 370 (Monday–Friday, 9am-5pm)
International Contact Number:   +61 2 9852 5656 (Monday–Friday, 9am-5pm)