NICTA appoints new head of high- tech research

Peter Dinham
Monday, 07 September 2009 13:14

IT People - People

Australia’s National Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence, NICTA, has appointed Dr Sylvie Thiébaux as director of its Canberra research laboratory. Dr Thiebaux, an Associate Professor at the Australian National University has worked at NICTA for six years, leading a project which developed tools to diagnose problems in complex systems such as smart energy grids.

NICTA’s Acting CEO, Dr Phil Robertson, said today Dr Thiébaux succeeded former Canberra Laboratory Director, Dr David Everitt, who will stay at NICTA in a leadership role in the area of networked systems and continue his work as Associate Director of Education at CRL.

Dr Thiébaux said “seeing NICTA develop so rapidly into a world-class research organisation and a key player in Australia's ICT innovation system has been very exciting and I am thrilled by the opportunity to take the Canberra Research Lab to the next stage.

“This is an exciting time to take the reins of the Canberra laboratory. We will continue to focus on delivering research outcomes to Australia in the areas of e-government, bioengineering, and critical infrastructure management, and further strengthen our leading research capabilities in computer vision and automated data analysis.”

Dr Thiébaux received her PhD in computer science from the University of Rennes and CNRS, in France in 1995. She has held research positions with the French National ICT Research Institute INRIA, and with CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, before joining the ANU in 2001. She is associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, a guest editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, and a member of the board of directors of ICAPS, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling.