Raja Jurdak

Research Group Leader, Distributed Sensing Systems @ Data61, CSIRO
Prof. Raja Jurdak is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61, where he leads the Distributed Sensing Systems Group. He has a PhD in Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine in 2005, an MS in Computer Networks and Distributed Computing from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCI (2001), and a BE in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut (2000). His current research interests focus on energy-efficiency and mobility in networks. Prof. Jurdak and his group have led several large scale and long-term sensing projects on sensing remote and challenging environments, in agriculture, ecology, health, manufacturing, and energy. Most recently, he has led the large Batmon project for continental scale tracking of flying foxes, delivering near-perpetual tracking of small assets. His research at CSIRO has received multiple awards, including the CSIRO medal for environmental achievement and the Endeavour Executive Award in 2011, the Queensland iAwards Merit Award in 2014, and the best paper award at the EWSN conference in 2016.

Prof Jurdak has over 120 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, as well as a book published by Springer in 2007 titled Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks: A Cross-Layer Design Perspective. He serves on the editorial board of 3 international journals, and he regularly serves on the organising and technical program committees of international conferences (WoWMoM, IEEE Blockchain, DCOSS, RTSS, Sensapp, Percom, EWSN, ICDCS). Prof Jurdak is an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, and Adjunct Professor at University of New South Wales, Macquarie University and James Cook University. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

The driving interest of his research is around mobility and energy-efficiency in sensor networks. As our world embeds more resource-limited devices for digital data collection, coordinating among these devices to extract the most information value is key for better understanding the physical world and to determine how to best manage it. Sensor networks that operate in full harmony with the underlying dynamics of the environment they aim to monitor is the ultimate goal of his work.