Research Bites is your research news digest which aims to capture the diverse research happening in our faculty, collated from various media outlets. In this edition…
Teams from universities across Australia and New Zealand have come together in Brisbane to pitch their innovative solutions to real-world challenges, which they designed as part of this year’s Engineers Without Borders Challenge.
Students presented their ideas to a panel of experts, including representatives from the community partners they designed for, including: Domingos Dos Santos, Loidahar xefe de suku (chief of the village); Justino da Silva, WaterAid Australia’s Timor-Leste Country Director; and Emma Evans and Marcus Warusam from Torres Strait Island Regional Council.
Pictured right | CSU Engineering students presenting their project. (Source: Linkedin)
Congratulations Dr Milind Tiwari | AGSPS , who along with co-authors You Zhou, Ausma Bernot, PhD, and Kai Lin have been awarded the 2025 Best Paper Award by the Asian Criminological Society (ACS) for their paper Metacrime and Cybercrime: Exploring the Convergence and Divergence in Digital Criminality
Professor Lihong Zheng and Professor Ashad Kabir celebrates the great news that their PhD student Rabin Dulal from the School of Computing, Mathematics and Engineering, has received the Best Student Paper Award in recent Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AJCAI 2025), held in Canberra. The article When Language Model Guides Vision: Grounding DINO for Cattle Muzzle Detection can be accessed here.
Associate Professor Quazi Mamun and his colleagues, Asaduz Zaman, Ryan H.L. Ip, and K.M. Shamsul Haque recently published an open access article A bibliographic study of integrating IoT and geospatial modelling for sustainable smart agriculture in developed countries: Focus on Australia. In this review, the research team examined 172 peer-reviewed studies (2013–2023) from seven developed countries to understand how IoT and geospatial modelling are being combined to support sustainable smart agriculture, with a particular focus on Australia. You can access it here.
Associate Professor Cliff Lewis and his colleagues, Girish Prayag and Joya Kemper explored how experiences of prejudice shape LGBTQ+ identities and the consequences on brands that stand with them. At a time when corporate allyship is under pressure, the brands that stay committed—not performative—are the ones shaping culture. Visibility matters. Authenticity matters. Diversity matters. Especially when the politics get loud. Read about their findings here.
One again Dr Amanda Davies‘ ASC25 Best non-health paper award: Simulation-based learning – is it one size fits all? A model for designing in diversity of learners to engender learner inclusivity will be showcased at the The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) | the world’s largest and most influential event dedicated to modeling, simulation, and training.
Dr Leo Lin | Senior Lecturer in the School of Policing | celebrates two recent publications. The first is his latest article for East Asia Forum, which examines the US-UK joint action against Cambodia-based Prince Holding Group—the largest cryptocurrency forfeiture action in U.S. Department of Justice history.
The case involves the seizure of approximately US$15 billion in Bitcoin and exposes a complex web of alleged ‘pig butchering’ scams, forced labour, cybercrime, and money laundering operations that exploited financial systems and entities connected to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Access the article here.
The second publication, Reducing AI-Generated Misinformation in Australian Higher Education: A Qualitative Analysis of Institutional Responses to AI-Generated Misinformation and Implications for Cybercrime Prevention written with co-authors Dr Geberew Tulu Mekonnen(PhD), Dr. Immaculate (Mac) Dadiso Motsi-Omoijiade, Mladen Zecevic, Associate Professor Duane Aslett, and Dr Douglas M C Allan. The preliminary findings were presented with Dr Mekonnen at the EuroCrim2025 Conference in Athens, Greece, this September.
Leo expresses his special gratitude to Professor Lewis A. Bizo and Professor Zahid Islam for their unwavering support.
Dr Peter Adjei-Bamfo | School of Business | is proud to share his new collaborative research and article.
His team’s study shows that innovation-oriented procurement can stimulate emergent supplier networks, enabling firms to share complementary resources, mitigate innovation costs, and build sustainable innovation capacity. The article highlights how procurement strategy and network structure shape suppliers’ access to valuable knowledge, and how absorptive capacity enables some firms to tap resources beyond their immediate networks.
The article is open access and available for anyone who’d like to explore it.
Read this opinion piece by Dr Bede Harris, constitutional law expert and Senior Lecturer and Law Discipline Head in School of Business. Bede provides some insight into Australia reconsidering severing links with the monarchy and becoming a republic.
A new three-year Charles Sturt University research project has uncovered how extreme heat is quietly disrupting home care services in rural New South Wales.
The study was conducted by a team of Charles Sturt researchers in partnership with Baptist Care and reveals the physical and psychological toll of heatwaves on aged care workers and the urgent need for climate adaptation in the sector.
The research titled ‘The impact of climate change on the delivery of home care services’ was led by Senior Lecturer in Marketing Dr Jodie Kleinschafer in the School of Business. Read about it here.
The 15th Australasian Business Ethics Network (ABEN) Annual Conference and hybrid higher degree research (HDR) workshop was held at the University’s Bathurst campus | Wednesday 26 to Friday 28 November.
The ABEN has members in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Africa and Europe and the conference will be officially opened by ABEN Chair Dr Alessandro Bressan.
The conference was organised by Senior Lecturer in Marketing in the Charles Sturt School of Business Dr Felicity Small and colleagues Associate Professor in Management Alain Neher and Lecturer in Human Resource Management Dr Lucia Wuersch.
The conference theme is On the Road: Making Ethical and Sustainable Decisions and Dr Small said this is the first time that the ABEN conference has been held outside a major Australian city.
Associate Professor Rafiqul Islam (pictured right) | School of Computing, Mathematics and Engineering | had the pleasure to deliver a keynote at iCWEE-2025 on “Secure and Smart: AI-Driven Cyber Resiliency in Water Engineering” at Western Sydney University, held from 19–21 November 2025.
He was honoured to join discussions with esteemed water and environmental engineering experts on the growing importance of AI and cyber risk in the water and environmental sector. In addition, Rafiqul served as a Session Chair during the conference. Read more about it here.
Professor Julian Parker-Mcleod | Head of School of Policing | is proud of the latest edition of the Blackstone’s Handbook for Policing Students. Julian remains part of the fantastic editorial team whilst working with Charles Sturt University & NSW Police Force Australia.
Dr Leo Lin | School of Policing | is pleased to share that he is collaborating with Prof. Dr. Shyam Goyal and digital forensics expert Nikhil Kumar Goyal as one of the editors of IGI Global’s forthcoming book, “Policing and Investigating the Dark Web in the Age of AI.” This volume explores how Artificial Intelligence is transforming digital policing, dark web investigations, and forensic analysis. Read more about it here.
Congratulations to our exceptional alum Dr Nectarios Costadopoulos for publishing another paper from his PhD thesis, together with his co-authors Dr David Tien, Dr Sabih Rehman, and Professor Zahid Islam.
The paper, An Agnostic Interpretable Machine Learning for Knowledge Discovery Framework, presents the research team’s new framework AIM4KD (Agnostic Interpretable Machine Learning for Knowledge Discovery). It delivers a 22 fold increase in high-quality logic rules for better knowledge discovery and emotional-stress detection by combining preprocessing, classification, and interpretability in an innovative way.
Their code and DEAP dataset preprocessing scripts are now publicly available, empowering researchers to explore interpretable AI in health, finance, and beyond.
Professor Lihong Zheng celebrates her team’s highly cited paper “Image Segmentation for MR Brain Tumor Detection Using Machine Learning: A Review.” It has been awarded 1st Prize in the 2025 IEEE Engineering Medicine and Biology Prize Paper Award. Congratulations to all involved!
Dr Michael Bewong was privileged to present his collaborative research titled: FastER: On-Demand Entity Resolution in Property Graphs at the 24th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2025, ERA/CORE Ranked A), held in the stunning city of Nara, Japan. This work addresses the challenge of identifying and merging multiple representations of the same real-world entity in graph data. Imagine a system that can automatically retrieve and unify your forgotten duplicate accounts across platforms to enhance data quality on demand! The paper is freely accessible here.
Michael extends his gratitude to his co-authors Shujing Wang, Sibo Zhao, Shiqi Miao, Selasi Kwashie, Junwei Hu, Vincent M. Nofong, PhD and Zaiwen Feng for their collaborative spirit and dedication over the years, and to Charles Sturt University for supporting the research journey that led to this publication.
Congratulations to The Data Science & Engineering Research Unit (DSERU), part of the School of Computing, Mathematics, and Engineering. Under the leadership of Professor Lihong Zheng, the DSERU has won an accolade in the Australia Learning & Development Innovation of the Year – Education category at the Asian Innovation Excellence Awards 2025. The recognition highlights the university’s research outcomes that combine advanced data science, engineering, and technology applications to address Australia’s sustainability and development priorities.
Professor Jac Birt, Head of School (Business), is very proud to share and is celebrating the publication of the 9th edition of their Accounting textbook! Thank-you to all the team at Wiley and her fabulous colleagues and authors:
Mark Levings
Georgie O’Brien
Tara Seeto
David Bond
Albie Brooks
Keryn Chalmers
Suzanne Maloney
Judy Oliver
Shweta Sehgal
