Associate Professor Elena Sitnikova recently won a prestigious award, while other successes include Flinders students competing in the national Rover Challenge, an appointment to the Open Access Australasia executive committee, and two Flinders’ staff helping an international effort to advance gender equality.
Leading the way in cybersecurity
Associate Professor Elena Sitnikova – a recent arrival at Flinders University – has won a 2022 Women in AI Award, which honours the top Australian and New Zealand women in working Artificial Intelligence. As a specialist in cybersecurity, Associate Professor Sitnikova won the AI in Cyber Security category – and was applauded at the awards as a “pioneer taking the road less-travelled, and a woman paving the way for others to reach even further and to dare to dream even bigger”.
Open Access to executive committee
Flinders’ Associate Librarian Dr Danny Kingsley has been named among the new members of the Open Access Australasia executive committee. This new committee represents a wealth of expertise and experience from across New Zealand and Australia, and includes members who have worked across the region and internationally. Their aim is to help provide guidance and expertise that ensures Open Access Australasia can continue to provide open access to research publications – preprints, peer reviewed scholarly manuscripts, books, monographs and theses.
All over the National Rover Challenge
A team from Flinders University’s motion capture and virtual production space, The Void, attended the 2022 Australian Rover Challenge, a national competition hosted last month by the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources (ATCSR) at the University of Adelaide. This competition is a new addition to the University Rover Challenge series run in America, Canada, Europe and India.
This year’s challenge saw Australian university students building, operating and competing their semi-autonomous Rover vehicles in a simulated lunar environment, accomplishing a series of navigation, resource utilisation and construction tasks.
Coordinating gender equality
To mark International Women’s Day, students from Flinders University joined counterparts from Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Dubai, along with influential business leaders and academics from Australia and United Arab Emirates, to take part in a virtual conference about further understanding of gender equality in Arab nations. The event was coordinated by Flinders’ Dr Ashok Manoharan and Associate Professor Janice (Jane) Jones.
Participants in Australia were treated to a virtual tour of Expo Dubai 2020, viewing both the Australian Pavilion and the Women’s Pavilion via livestream. The Australian Pavilion hosted a panel comprising Dubai’s leading business women, who shared their stories and discussed opportunities for gender equality. In the Women’s Pavilion, managers from leading Dubai-based logistic company Hellmann Worldwide Logistics discussed gender equality in a traditionally male-dominated field, and discussed how innovative companies can overcome barriers to promote gender equality.