CommBank Centre for Foundational AI Research

Professor Simon Lucey is the Director of AIML at Adelaide University. Previously, he held key positions at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, the autonomous vehicle company Argo AI, and CSIRO.

Professor Lucey’s research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, and robotics, drawing inspiration from pioneering AI researchers to uncover computational and mathematical models underlying visual perception.

Professor Anton van den Hengel is the Chief Scientist and Founding Director of AIML, alongside his roles as Director of the Centre for Augmented Reasoning (CAR) at AIML, Chair of the Kingston AI Group, and a professor of computer science at Adelaide University.

Professor van den Hengel’s research focuses on deep learning, combining vision and language, video analysis, and medical AI.

Dr Hemanth Saratchandran is a senior researcher at AIML with research interests in artificial intelligence, deep learning, geometric analysis, and topology. Previously, he held positions at the Institute for Geometry and its Applications at the University of Adelaide, the University of Augsburg, and the Beijing International Centre for Mathematical Research.

Dr Kathy Nicholson is Institute Manager at AIML, where she oversees strategic operations and fosters collaboration between research and industry. She is also a Board Director and Policy Chair for Science & Technology Australia (STA), actively championing diversity, inclusion, and science policy reform across the STEM sector.

Rosa Pearson is a seasoned project manager and strategic partnerships leader with over a decade of experience driving collaboration across industry, government, and academia. As Research Strategy and Development Manager at AIML, she leads and oversees multiple initiatives driving the institute’s research strategy and strategic partnerships across a range of domains.

Dr Yuanhong Chen is a postdoctoral researcher at AIML specialising in computer vision, multimodal learning, and generative models. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and works on bridging medical image analysis and audio-visual perception with deep learning. His current research explores integrating large language models for cross-modal understanding and reasoning.

Dr Mahalakshmi Sabanayagam is research fellow at AIML who works at the intersection of theory and practice to build efficient, trustworthy machine learning models. Her research develops principled foundations for deep learning and its adversarial robustness, drawing on optimisation and connections to kernel methods. She is also excited about graph-based learning problems and theory-guided method development.

Brendan Hopper is the Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) Group's Managing DIrector for Innovation Ecosystems. He is responsible for ensuring that CommBank has world-leading IT engineering capability and makes the right technology investments and decisions so that technology becomes an accelerator, not a disruptor, for CommBank and its customers.

Sabina Streatfeild is the Executive Manager Innovation Ecosystems & Tech Community at CommBank. She is responsible for education, innovation, and research partnerships in technology.  She and her team are actively involved in the technology community, contributing to education programs and partnerships that will set Australia up for success as the economy transitions to a more digital future.

Dr Luiz Pizzato is a Distinguished AI Scientist and General Manager at CommBank, where he focuses on building AI innovation that can improve people’s lives. He has a PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has developed the first Reciprocal Recommender systems. He held previous positions in academia, start-ups, and has led innovation labs in global consulting firms.

Dr Anna Leontjeva is an Executive Manager of AI Labs at CommBank, where she leads the bank's Centre of Excellence dedicated to artificial intelligence research and development. Anna holds a PhD in Computer Science and has over 15 years of expertise in AI. At AI Labs, she directs strategic initiatives focusing on cutting-edge AI technologies, including graph machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI. Prior to joining CommBank, Anna held academic positions where she contributed to foundational research in artificial intelligence.