WHO ARE WE
IDA is a "spin-off" that aims to bridge the gaps between academia and business, enable industry and government "easy to do business with" leading research institutions and experts, and build a platform for interactions and collaborations between outstanding researchers, practitioners and educators.

You shall find the IDA team very self-motivated, high standard and forward thinking focused. The IDA institute paves a path for different purposes:

  • converting excellent research outcomes in academia to actionable decision-support systems and tools for industry;
  • connecting local, regional and global resources in research and business towards developing world-class centre of excellence;
  • building a flexible and engaging culture and niche for broad-based collaborations in data science and analytics innovation, services and training.
Vision
We are dedicated to enable and build the world-class thought leadership, capabilities and calibre for the excellence of innovation, training and services, as well as data-enabled economy and society, in data and analytics, in particular, data science and advanced analytics.
Mission
Driven by next-generation innovation and research, plus the heart of supporting the building of capabilities and giving back to the community, we are dedicated to create opportunities of
  • Forming an independent and "easy-to-do business with" platform for problem-driven innovation, evidence-based decision support, and performance-oriented validation.
  • Fostering the global thought leadership in data and analytics.
  • Specialising in an in-depth and complete understanding of data across major domains, medias and networks.
  • Discovering comprehensive insights by analysing big data to enable 100% customer satisfaction.
  • Constructing personalised big data solutions to strengthen enterprise operations, growth and development.
  • Addressing emerging data complexities through inventing cutting-edge and actionable analytical technologies.
  • Delivering best practice experience and operable corporate training workshops and courses to lift capabilities and productivity.
  • Bridging the gaps between innovation and economy, and incubating operable products and services in data and analytics.
Governance
The Institute is governed by its core leadership team composed of co-directors, chief officers and directors.

The Institute appoints the chief officers and function Directors for them to drive the Institute in strategic planning, business development and operations.

The co-directors, Chief Scientist and function Directors regularly report to the Board of Advisers to seek advice on strategic planning, operations and future directions.

Board of Advisers
Active global leaders in the areas and domains relevant to broad-based data and analytics research, education and business are assisting the Institute in contributing their insights, vision and experience to the community and capability building.
Chair of the Board


Dr Usama Fayyad
Team

At the IDA, we are working with a group of exceptionally experienced thought-leaders, experts and hands-on practitioners who were the very few originally advocating and practising explicit and implicit data understanding and analytics in the field and community. The team has solid connections and regular interactions with a group of world-class leaders in the field, and drives original initiatives in the areas of big data, data science, knowledge discovery and their enterprise applications.

The following people contribute to the International Institute of Data & Analytics (IDA) in a number of ways:


  • Dr. Li, co-founder of IDA, received his PhD in fraud detection at the Advanced Analytics Institute (AAI) of University of Technology Sydney in 2013. Dr Li is an expert in fraud detection and risk management, his rich experience of data analytics and data mining in capital market, public sector, transport and marketing makes him very unique.

    After the completion of his PhD, he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney. Dr. Li served as the team leader of industry projects and led many large projects at AAI. For over six years, he has been engaged in frontier big data research, such as Contrast Pattern Mining, Big Data Visualization, Parallel Computing, Deep Learning and Transfer Learning. He has also been leading comprehensive industry projects, such as online banking fraud detection for Westpac, debt collection and payment accuracy improvement for Centrelink and NSW OSR, online recommendation system for capital markets, customer care and marketing analytics for Microsoft, transport risk prediction for IAG, and teaching & learning analytics for UTS.

  • Dr. Zheng, co-founder of IDA, was awarded a PhD in behavior analytics at the Advanced Analytics Institute (AAI) of University of Technology Sydney in 2012. He is an expert in behavior analytics and data mining, and has very rich experience in such domains as healthcare, car insurance, and government service.

    He worked as a research fellow for around four years at the Advanced Analytics Institute since he completed his PhD, and managed several large industry projects focusing on data mining applications, including healthcare data analytics for HCF, predictive modelling and behavior analytics for ATO, and fraud detection and pattern analysis in financial industries and government public services. He has strong research capabilities, four years of industry analytics project experience with major Australian industries and government agencies, and had been as data/business analyst in a large car insurance company before doing PhD. His capabilities and experiences of solving complex real-world business problems by using advanced analytics technologies are outstanding. The projects he managed and led were all very successful, especially the projects for debt collection optimization with ATO have been well recognized by the government and in the OECD report about smarter tax management.

  • Dr. Ou, co-founder of IDA, was awarded a PhD in financial data analytics at the University of Technology Sydney. He is passionate about big data analytics, and has broad knowledge and experience in machine learning, data mining and big data. He has very substantial experience in government data analytics, financial data analytics, transport data analysis and marketing data analytics.

    He has successfully completed a range of data analytical projects for different domains and organisations, including capital market data analysis for Capital Markets CRC and Shanghai Stock Exchange, behavior analytics and debt collection enhancement for ATO, payment accuracy optimisation and fraud detection for Centrelink, transport data analysis and visualisation for IAG, and marketing analytics and prediction for Microsoft.
  • Dr Dan Luo, co-founder of the IDA, has been awarded a PhD in Computing Science at the University of Technology Sydney, majored in data mining and knowledge discovery. She is specialised in data warehousing and actionable knowledge discovery, in addition to computer science fundamentals.

    Before she joined UTS, she had rich experience in several domains, as a government officer, a computer engineer, a journalist, and a lecturer. After completed her PhD, she owned several years of research fellowship at the Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems Centre and the Advanced Analytics Institute at UTS.
  • Dr. Wei, senior data scientist of IDA, received his PhD in machine learning and data mining at the Advanced Analytics Institute (AAi) of University of Technology Sydney in 2014. Dr. Wei is an expert in time series forecasting, statistical learning, supervised learning and unsupervised learning.He has rich experience of data analytics and data mining in financial markets (i.e., stock market), public sectors(i.e., Australian Taxation Office), and insurance industry.

    After the completion of his PhD, he was appointed as a research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. For over 5 years, he has been engaged in frontier research -- relational modelling and big data research, i.e., dependence predictive modelling in stock and currency markets . Dr. Wei also served as the team leader of Australian Taxation Office project. He leaded two project of ATO, the self-lodgement behaviour prediction and the next best action projects. He leaded the team to help Australian Taxation Office resolve a large number of business issues and develop a real time predictive and monitoring system that automatically detect the abnormal behaviours of tax payers. In addition, he engaged in other projects, such as transport data analysis and visualisation for Insurance Australian Group(IAG).
  • Dr. Liu, senior data scientist of the IDA, received her PhD in Information Systems at the Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong 2008. She has extensive data analysis experience in both research and business projects. Dr Liu is an expert in financial data mining, recommendation systems, and business intelligence, involving with analytics in stock exchange, education, marketing research and social network.

    After the completion of her PhD, she was worked as Research Fellow in the University of Melbourne and City University of Hong Kong. She mainly focused on data mining in financial area, including anomaly detection, pattern recognition, and time series representation in an incremental way and recommendation systems with link analysis and content based mining. She had also been working comprehensive business projects, reviewer recommendation in E-Grant application systems for NSFC(https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantweb/), information push in social network platform including friend and article recommenation (http://www.scholarmate.com/scmwebsns/), research analytics in research management information system used in the universities in China mainland and Hong Kong(http://www.citinethk.com/en/university.html), and debt collection and client risk management for Australian Tax Office.
  • Dr Maninder Bhatia has over 20 years of experience in developing and deploying advanced analytic solutions to business problems and conducting strategic research. Maninder’s expertise was honed over two decades of experience with several blue chip organisations, universities and the public sector in areas ranging from risk and debt management, behavioural modelling, customer profiling and segmentation, churn modelling to forecasting and predictive analytics. In his recent position, Maninder led the development of advanced analytical solutions for the Australian Tax Office, in collaboration with UTS, to improve efficiency and effectiveness of debt collection and taxpayer engagement. Among his significant previous positions, Maninder was a Senior Econometrician at the Hutchison Telecom; Risk and Profitability Manager at St George Bank; and Receivable Risk Manager at Optus. Throughout his career, Maninder has built a reputation of being results focused to deliver significant business value through customised innovative solutions. Embracing the core values of integrity, innovation and growth, Maninder has consistently ranked among the top employees of most of the organizations he has served. He won certificate of excellence for innovative ground breaking work at ATO and Best Practice awards at Optus and Silver Quality Award for total quality management at American Express. Maninder Bhatia holds a PhD degree in Economics and an MSc degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Manitoba, Canada. Maninder is also an experienced academic with a strong teaching background. He has taught post graduate courses at the Sydney campuses of the University of Newcastle, University of Wollongong and Curtin University. He has successfully supervised doctoral dissertations and has been a dissertation examiner as well.

  • Dr. Zhao received a PhD in data mining at the University of Technology Sydney in 2007. He is an expert in data mining and machine learning, as well as in data analytics with R. Dr Zhao has about 10 years' hands-on experience in government data analytics.

    He has been leading a group of R and Data Mining, and leading and coordinating the training and knowledge sharing of R analytics in a broad community. Dr. Zhao is specialised in fraud detection, risk management, behavior analytics, social media analysis and process analysis.
  • Dr. Cui, data scientist of IDA, received her PhD in machine learning and data mining at the Advanced Analytics Institute (AAi) of University of Technology Sydney in 2015, and received her PhD in Artificial intelligence and Intelligent System in 2003. Dr. Cui is an expert in time series forecasting, statistical learning, supervised learning and unsupervised learning. She has rich experience of data analytics and data mining in public sectors and industry.
Our Story
The IDA is a private institution created by PhDs, with some of them who have played the leading role in creating and fostering the first and mostly respected Australian analytics research group: the Advanced Analytics Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

We are committed to give back to the society by sharing many years of research, training and development experience in data & analytics, sharing best practices of effectively implementing a series of big data consulting projects and services for government and industry across Australia and other countries in areas including the public sector, capital markets, marketing, Telecom, banking, insurance, education, airline business, transport and logistics.

Aiming at effectively bridging the gaps between innovation and business, the IDA enables data science and big data talents work together on a flexible mode to build the thought leadership, think tank, innovation, enterprise, services, education and engagement in a faster, simpler and more cost-effective manner towards not-for-profit, outcome-focused, business-friendly, and flexible social networking and engagement experience.
Affiliated Partners and Supporters