Professor Flora Salim is the inaugural CISCO Chair of Digital Transport, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney, and the Deputy Director of the UNSW AI Institute. Her research is on AI and machine learning and on trustworthy AI, with specific interests on data-efficient learning with multimodal sensor data, time-series and spatio-temporal data, explainable AI, fairness and robustness, generative AI and foundation models, and continual learning of the open world. Flora’s research group – Context Recognition and Urban Intelligence (CRUISE) – consists of more than fourteen PhD students and five postdocs. She is actively recruiting for new members to join the group.

She received the Women in AI Awards 2022 Australia New Zealand in the Defence and Intelligence category. She was a Humboldt-Bayer Fellow (from Bayer Foundation GmbH), Humboldt Fellow -experienced researcher (from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), Victoria Fellow 2018 (from Victorian government). She was the recipient of the the RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence–Early Career Researcher 2016; the RMIT Award for Research Impact - Technology 2018; Victorian iAwards (2014), Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Research Industry (APDI) Fellow (2012-2015); IBM Smarter Planet Industry Skills Innovation Award (2010). She has attracted more than $20m in research and industry funding in the last 10 years, as lead or sole CI for more than half of these grants, including research funded by ARC, Microsoft Research US, Northrop Grumman Corporation US, Qatar National Priorities Research Program, Cisco, IBM Research, several city councils and many other industry and government partners/funders. She has worked with many industry and government partners, and managed large-scale research and innovation projects, leading to several patents and deployed systems.

She serves as a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts. She is a Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society (ADMS), co-leading the Machines Program and Mobilities Focus Area. She serves as an Editor of the PACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Associate-Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing, Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, and a Steering Committee member of ACM UbiComp. She has served as a Senior Area Chair / Area Chair of AAAI, WWW, NeurIPS, and many other top-tier conferences in AI and ubiquitous computing.

She holds an Honorary Professor appointment at RMIT University. She was a Visiting Professor at University of Kassel, Germany, and University of Cambridge, England, in 2019. She is an Associate of ELLIS Alicante.

She obtained her PhD from Monash University in 2009.

Scholarship Opportunities

I am always recruiting for highly talented PhD students to join our group. You need to have strong research experience in AI and machine learning, have first-class Honours equivalence, and highly motivated in solving fundamental AI/ML problems while making realworld impact. Contact me flora.salim@unsw.edu.au.

Our Team

CRUISE team at UNSW