Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) has announced that Melbourne researchers Gemma Sharp and Shoujin Wang have been named this year’s recipients of the Annual Club Melbourne Fellowship programme.
The winners were chosen based on the impact of their research and how it will benefit the Victorian economy, as the Club Melbourne Fellowship provides research funding of A$2,500 (US$1,755) to support international conference attendance that enables new research opportunities.
Sharp is currently an NHMRC early career senior research fellow at the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre where she established and leads the Body Image Research Unit. Her areas of research expertise are body image and eating disorders.
Sharp’s project will be using smartphone sensors to allow personalised mental health interventions, adapted to the user’s current mental health state.
She led a pilot programme with a ‘chatbot’ to simulate human-like conversations, and the pilot chatbot was highly successful with more than 20,000 users in less than a year and plans to expand on this programme.
Wang is a research fellow at the School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University. His research interests include data mining, machine learning and recommender systems.
His research supported by the Club Melbourne Fellowship program is in Artificial Intelligence Enabled Trustworthy Recommender Systems. This project will provide a solution to address cybersecurity issues in various online consumption domains, effectively reduce online shopping scams and cyber fraud, and help reduce the amount of money lost by Australians by more than A$4 million annually.
MCEC’s acting CEO, Helen Fairclough said the Club Melbourne Program, owned by MCEC, is a valuable tool in expanding Melbourne’s important place in research and leadership.
“Having hosted 156 events since inception and delivered A$1 billion in economic impact, the Club Melbourne Ambassador Program has developed many important initiatives, like the Fellowship, to give talented people an opportunity to share their invaluable knowledge with the rest of the world.”
Launched in 2015 at the 10th anniversary of the Club Melbourne Program, the Fellowship delivers community benefits through education, networking, and collaboration, with access to the Club Melbourne network through attendance at annual programme events.
