AucklandICT – Protecting New Zealand’s assets – Cyber and Human
Dr Sarrafzadeh, HOD Computing, Unitec
This session discussed the role of the Centre for Computational Intelligence for Cyber Security, issues with imbalance of supply and demand of cyber security graduates (and what Unitec is doing about it), and how the challenge of cyber security can be turned into opportunities for New Zealand.
Cyber security is an issue. As demonstrated by the recent attacks on Sony and the White House, no company regardless of their mission and no nation is exempt from cyber attacks. Through monitoring of traffic into New Zealand, Unitec researchers have noted that New Zealand had significantly more attacks than a considerably larger country, Japan – suggesting that cyber criminals may see us as a soft target.
Dr Sarrafzadeh has a PhD in Computing, and years of both academic and industrial experience. Currently Professor and Head of Department of Computing at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, Dr Sarrafzadeh is an experienced academic leader, an established researcher, with extensive industry networks.
Dr Sarrafzadeh’s research interests are in the areas of Computational Intelligence for Cyber Security, Effective and Intelligent Systems and Machine Translation. To address the immediate and future needs of the industry, he has led the development of specialisations in cyber security, business intelligence, games and health software development. In recent years, Dr Sarrafzadeh has developed one of the world’s first real-time facial expression and gesture recognition systems. He has also developed a novel vision based targeted advertising system which has been patented in New Zealand and internationally. Dr Sarrafzadeh is one of the founders/directors of the Centre for Computational Intelligence in Cyber Security (CICS) and the Centre for Computational Intelligence in Environmental Engineering (CIEE) at Unitec, with collaborators in NZ, Japan, China, Australia and the US, including several industry partners.
