Professor Kate Smith-Miles - new career focus ignites at Deakin

It’s hard to know what is the most newsworthy:
The fact that along the road to becoming a prolific researcher, Professor Kate Smith-Miles had an epiphany.

Or the fact that she had the time for one.

One of Deakin’s youngest senior academics, the head of the University’s School of Engineering and IT has already had what can only be described as a crowded personal and professional life.

By the time she was considering a move to Deakin last year, aged just 35, she already had on her CV seven ARC grants, more than 150 papers and the supervision of 15 PhD students.

Then there was the not small matter of parenthood – Charlotte four and James two – plus her passion for that most wonderful of musical instruments with its deep, rich sounds, the 'cello.

But let’s get back to the epiphany, because – squeezed into all of the above and plenty more as well - it has played a critical role in bringing Professor Smith-Miles to Deakin.

“I discovered I actually enjoy helping other people do research as much as I enjoy doing research myself,” she said.

“Years ago when I got my first paper in a good quality journal or my first ARC grant, that was a real buzz for me, but I noticed that as time went on I got more of a buzz out of the success of someone I had been mentoring.

“So when the job came up here at Deakin last year, I saw it as a really great opportunity for me to expand my role as a facilitator of other people’s research, especially in a school like ours which has a great breadth of opportunities.

“We cover everything from mechanical engineering, electronics, robotics and mechatronics engineering, through to - on the IT side - computer science, web and mobile technologies, IT security, games, multimedia and of course mathematics.

“Up until recently, I had been one of those people who couldn’t say no. If someone came to me and said do you want to be involved in this project, and if there was a glimmer of interest, I’d say ‘I’m in’.

“I had my own research spread across a lot of fields and so here at Deakin, I feel like I have a foot in a lot of our camps already.

“Another thing that was very attractive was the cross disciplinary approach to research here at Deakin, people working together across a range of fields.

“That fitted in with my own beliefs and my own multi-disciplinary approach to research, bringing together ideas and people from all sorts of backgrounds and areas of work and applying the outcomes in a meaningful way.

“There is also the opportunity for a real convergence of technologies here – info, bio, nano – which was a vision I articulated when applying for the Head of School role. This will be strengthened with the university’s current vision to set up a Silicon Valley type of relationship between industry and Deakin in Geelong.

“When I was applying to join Deakin I had this perception the university was on a rapid trajectory to doing significant research that industry and society needs, rather than just playing the numbers game.

“Not all universities are focussed on that yet and Deakin has got a head start in this area.”

Professor Smith-Miles has an academic background in mathematics and electrical engineering, and was awarded a commonwealth PhD scholarship to Melbourne University to work on a collaborative project jointly funded by CSIRO.

After gaining her PhD, she then set out on the road to becoming the polymath she is today, celebrating her graduation by taking up the 'cello, as well as the lecturing position in information technology that lead to promotion through to a professorship at Monash within 10 years.

As well as a mentor for postgraduates, Professor Smith-Miles is a driving force at Deakin behind bringing more female undergraduates into engineering and IT.

She has set up IGNITED – Initiative for a Girls’ Network in Information Technology and Engineering @ Deakin.

“When you’ve got a good acronym, you’ve got to use it,” Professor Smith-Miles smiles.

“We have achieved a 19 per cent increase in female students in the past 12 months, and have succeeded in attracting really high achievers.

“IGNITED is not just about attracting more female students though, it’s about ensuring the students who do come have a supportive environment, that they complete their degrees and that we deliver on our promise to industry to provide talented, young people ready to work.”

A lot of the focus of her work might have changed, and she might be working hard to narrow down her research, but there is still a lot of the person who can’t say no about Professor Smith-Miles.

She has also taken on a teaching role at Deakin - primary school mathematics teachers; a long way from cutting edge research but no less important to her.

“As a mother of two children, I am very passionate that primary school students should have as their mathematics teachers people who are enthusiastic about the subject, not frightened of it,” she says.

“One of the reasons I took up mathematics at university was because I had an enthusiastic teacher when I was at school. I feel very strongly it is important that future generations also have access to teachers who are not only not frightened of mathematics, but can really sell it.

“You just don’t know what future talented scientists may be in their class rooms.”

Professor Smith-Miles has also found time within her Head of School role to resume her own research agenda which she says is both focussed and broad adding wryly: “If you can have such a thing. I’ve focussed on being cross-disciplinary.

“I think I can comfortably say now that when I was at Monash, I was involved in way too many things. It’s useful for developing a broad perspective, but exhausting.

“Basically my research now is in data mining and optimisation, focused on building computer models to predict future events or optimise the outcomes, based on learning from the information that is buried in databases of historical events.”

“I have been involved in lots of projects using these methods in areas as diverse as healthcare, insurance, and telecommunications … because I can’t say no to an interesting project.

Projects Professor Smith-Miles has worked on include:

• building computer models to predict the likely occurrence of identity fraud in credit applications (in partnership with Veda Advantage who looks after the Australian Credit Bureau data)

• building computer model to optimise the allocation of mobile phone frequencies (channels) to phone calls to minimise interference in the network (with Hughes Network Systems, USA)

• building computer models to predict future insolvency of Australian corporations (in partnership with Lincoln Indicators)

• building computer models to predict customer sensitivity to premium price changes and churn rates in the insurance industry (with AAMI)

• building computer models to find the optimal dispatch of electricity within the bidding process of the Australian National Electricity Market (with NEMMCO - National Electricity Market Management Corporation)

• building computer models to predict the spread of epidemiological outbreaks like measles and water-related gastroenteritis

• building computer models to predict punter spending on horse races subject to different track conditions, weather, etc. (with TAB NSW)

• building computer models to predict the length of stay in hospital of patients admitted through the emergency department presenting with various symptoms and demographic profile (with Frankston Hospital)

“Once I had my children though, there was a conscious feeling of not just wanting to get the life/work balance right, but also to get my research more focussed,” she said.

“Maternity leave gave me the chance to step back, and from a distance I could see some common themes in my research that hadn’t been visible when I was involved in the thick of it.

“With many of the projects I have been involved in, there are lots of choices for models that could be developed.

“Which one is best? How does someone know in advance which one is going to be best without testing all of them in a trial and error manner?

“These questions have led to my current research focus on meta-learning where I study the performance behaviour of different learning algorithms (models) and learn something about the conditions under which different algorithms perform well. This gives us meta-knowledge to assist with automated algorithm selection.”

Already this research has produced another paper - Cross Disciplinary Perspectives On The Algorithm Selection Problem.

“One thing I have discovered is that within various disciplinary groups, whether it be the mathematicians, statisticians, data mining, or artificial intelligence communities, when researchers don’t talk to each other, they don’t know that a lot of the things they are trying to solve have already been solved by other researchers in other areas.

“I have given keynote speeches at three conferences in the past three months in Montreal, Melbourne and Orlando, each within a different disciplinary field.

“No matter which audience I was addressing, they were all sitting there nodding saying yeah, I didn’t know about that, and some of the things about which they didn’t know were 15 years old.

“So many opportunities for cross fertilisation of ideas are never exploited because of artificial boundaries we set up in our disciplines. I’d really like to see more cross fertilisation, breaking down those barriers and that is one of the things that is happening here at Deakin.”

Professor Smith-Miles is now starting to get the balance between home and work right – she even has time now to teach Charlotte the ‘cello – and she has also discovered that Deakin, and its unique approach to cross disciplinary research with meaningful outcomes for the community, is the right home for her.

BACK