Presented on: Wednesday, 17th June 2020

Scenarios for China’s Future Military Presence in the Indian Ocean Region
Presented by Dr David Brewster

Presented on: Wednesday, 22nd July 2020

Asymmetry and Air Power: Exquisite Investment or Extraneous Irrelevance
Presented by GPCAPT Doc Millar (Rtd.)

Presented on: Thursday, 20 August 2020

An Australian Space Industrial Base – Grand Strategy or Strategy of Grandeur?
By Mr Darin Lovett

This presentation took the form of an online webinar, approx. 60 minutes in duration.

Download the PPT Slides
 

Synopsis
It’s a pivotal moment to be engaged in the space sector in Australia. Our small but dynamic space industry is growing, and billions of dollars in capital investment are slated for new Defence capabilities. However, despite laudable growth and investment, the recent COVID crisis has fundamentally altered the national economy and re-energised the discussion around sovereignty and resilience.The question we will consider is: to what extent should Defence policy support an Australian Space Industrial Base?

Speaker
Darin Lovett is Director Space for the South Australian Space Industry Centre.
He has more than 30-years experience in strategy and capability development for the Air and Space domains. His diverse background includes LVC Manager at Boeing Phantom Works, space operations and policy, university lecturer, weapons test and evaluation, airborne anti-submarine and surveillance operations, coalition partnering, and large-scale transformation projects.
His ‘space credentials’ include: staff officer in Australia’s joint Defence Space Coordinating Office, four years on staff to the US Executive Agent for Space within the Pentagon, graduate of the International Space University, and Chief of Australia’s Space Operations Centre within HQ Joint Operations Command. He frequently contributes to the discussion on space on space security.

Check Darin's LinkedIn profile here

Wednesday, 23 September 2020

Cyber Security for Aviation Operations
Presented by Dr Elena Sitnikova

This presentation was delivered on Wednesday 23rd September 2020 and took the form of an online webinar, approx. 60 minutes in duration.

View Powerpoint Slides

Further Reading 

• Al-Hawawreh M, Den Hartog F, Sitnikova E,2019 Targeted Ransomware: A new cyber threat to Edge System of Brownfield, Industrial Internet of Things, IEEE Internet of Things Journal 
• Moustafa N  A Systemic IoT-Fog-Cloud Architecture for Big-Data Analytics and Cyber Security Systems: A Review of Fog Computing 
• Moustafa N., Choo K.,  Radwan. I, Camtepe S., Outlier Dirichlet Mixture Mechanism: Adversarial Statistical Learning for Anomaly Detection in the Fog 
• Fowler S, Sitnikova E., 2019,  A framework for assessing the cyber-worthiness of complex mission critical systems, Military Communications and Information Systems Conference (MilCIS) IEEE Stream, Nov 2019

The increasing proliferation of new technologies, together with greater levels of digitisation and connectivity of processes and systems in aviation industry, has broadened the number of vectors available to malicious actors. The result is an aviation industry more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Understanding designs for improving the resilience of complex networked aviation systems - particularly cyber-physical systems (CPS) and the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) - to cyber-attacks is essential for the commitment of new generation Air Force to “fly, fight and win - in air, space and cyberspace”.
This presentation highlights the challenges that aviation operations are facing today and describes a new UNSW Canberra research project on autonomous operations for a cyber-physical UAV Distributed Anomaly Detection system. This research seeks to promote awareness of cyber security in autonomous aviation operations and related confidentiality-integrity-availability (CIA-triad) issues across the Australian Defence Force. In particular, it addresses the following question: How to identify malicious attacks through anomaly detection in ways that will make mission-critical systems resilient to cyber-attacks?

Speaker
Dr Sitnikova PhD, BE (Hons), CSSLP, SFHEA is an award-winning academic and researcher at UNSW Canberra at ADFA. She is an internationally recognised leader in Critical Infrastructure cybersecurity research, with particular expertise in complex systems and networks, the key areas of cyber-physical systems security and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). She has expert knowledge and experience in cybersecurity, control systems, software and systems engineering, as well as cybersecurity education.
Dr Sitnikova’s contribution in the field is demonstrated through grants in excess of AUD $1M awarded by partners from industry, State and Federal Government in Australia. Some of her recent grants include Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group, CISIRO/Data61 grants and prestigious Spitfire Memorial Defence Fellowship, indicating her recognition as a contributor to Australia’s defence and security.
Dr Sitnikova worked previously in the IT industry as a senior software engineer with the Motorola Australia Global Software Group. Prior to moving to Australia, she worked for the space project Buran; the results of her research were implemented at “Energia“ (The Russian Space Research Centre in Moscow, Russia).

Thursday, 22 October 2020

Using Artificial Intelligence to Understand and Manage Risk
Presented by Professor Iven Mareels and Dr Simon Wail

Date and Time
10am, Thursday 22nd October, 2020

This presentation will take the form of an online webinar, approx. 60 minutes in duration. To attend or view the online webinar, you must register for the event. Registering will enable us to prepare safe seating in the theatre and, for the online webinar version, forward you the Event link and logon details.

Download the flyer

Synopsis
For almost a decade now, IBM Research has been supporting risk management in IBM corporate financial operations using AI tools. Out of this initial application of managing IBM risk through its exposure to the uncertain and fickle environment that financial markets represent, came the bold idea of creating a generic risk, AI based and data driven, support tool: Scenario Planning Advisor (SPA).
SPA is a suite of tools for the risk manager(s) to develop a collection of alternate, plausible future scenarios rooted in present reality. Its aim is to deal with the complexity of data, real time pressure, as well as the vast body of existing domain expertise. The tool is designed to augment the domain expert to deal effectively with the plurality and complexity of available data, allowing the planner/risk manager to explore a number of prioritised alternate, plausible scenarios to provide greater resilience and to treat uncertainty effectively and with respect. It provides the support to reduce human bias and to help decision making under stress.
In this presentation we take the audience through the SPA process, and how it may support risk management around specific missions.

Speakers
Prof Iven Mareels is the director of the IBM Research Laboratory in Australia. He joined IBM Research in February 2018 following a 20-year career at the University of Melbourne, where he spent the last 10 years as the Dean of the Melbourne School of Engineering. Prof Mareels received the Masters of Electromechanical Engineering in 1982 summa cum laude from the University of Gent, Belgium and the PhD from the Australian National University in 1987 with a thesis on dynamics of adaptive or learning systems. He is a Fellow, and Vice President (Financial Sustainability) of The Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (Australia); Fellow of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (USA), the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and Engineers Australia.

Dr. Simon Wail is a Research Manager for IBM Research – Australia. He studied computer science at RMIT and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering (1992). Simon is currently a member of the IBM Research Laboratory in Melbourne, as a Research Manager.
With his background in HPC and recent experiences with Life Sciences and Healthcare researchers, he applied all his knowledge in the advancement of AI for Smarter Healthcare. More recently he has taken on the management responsibilities of a team of AI and NLP researchers working on solving the difficult problems for finance, government and defence clients.

The seminar scheduled for November has not yet been finalised. Please check back closer to the date.

Please note that this video is not available on the Defence Protected Network.