STEM | School of Computing Technologies
Centre of Cyber Security Research and Innovation (CCSRI)
Space Industry Centre
Sir Lawrence Wackett Defence and Aerospace Centre
Email: zahir.tari@rmit.edu.au
Phone: +61 9925 3782
Campus: Melbourne City
STEM | School of Computing Technologies
Centre of Cyber Security Research and Innovation (CCSRI)
Space Industry Centre
Sir Lawrence Wackett Defence and Aerospace Centre
Email: zahir.tari@rmit.edu.au
Phone: +61 9925 3782
Campus: Melbourne City
As the Research Director of the RMIT Centre of Cyber Security Research and Innovation (CCSRI), Prof Zahir Tari is leading major Research and Development (R&D) activities in the cyber security areas across RMIT colleges (i.e., STEM, COBOL and Design). He works closely with various RMIT experienced and young researchers to tackle the ever-complex cyber-security challenges from technical, human and organisational perspectives.
Specifically, Prof Tari is considered as a leader in integrating contextual preferences from the perspective of humans and systems within cybersecurity concepts and methods. Over the past two decades, he developed ground-breaking solutions that addressed the core challenges of anomaly detection and survivability of large-scale systems and their impact on the end-users. Some of these innovations were commercialised through either partnership or research translation (e.g., MetaCDN). Prof Tari also secured over $13M AUD in funding, including 2 ARC LIEF, 17 ARC DP/LP, and one large grant from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. He supervised to completion of 31 PhD students and mentored 6 postdoctoral fellows and 3 research assistants. At this stage, Prof Tari published a total of 250 papers (i.e., 99 journals and 151 conferences), with an h-index of 42 and 8,000 citations.
In the past, Prof Tari has been an Associate Dean (Discipline Head) of the discipline Distributed Systems and Networking (DSN) (now called CSS -- Cloud, System and Security) for over 14 years, managing a large team of academics that contributed to excellence in teaching and research in some of the core areas of Computer Science (i.e., Networking, Security, Cloud). The discipline was ranked 4 in the 2018 ERA ranking in 0804 Distributed Systems. The discipline’s members have also been successfully in working closely with various IT industries, and have also successfully been awarded several funding, including ARC Linkage and Discovery.
Finally, Prof Tari has been recently appointed as an ARC College of Expert (CoE) member, serving for the period of 2022-2024.
Prof Tari has been closely working with many local IT industries and international ones (e.g., Siemens/Germany) in various aspects related to Cloud/Edge and Cybersecurity technologies. He successfully led over twelve substantial collaborative projects with local IT industries through the ARC Likage scheme, and some of the foundamental work carried out in these projects led to product commercialisation (e.g. MetaCDN). More recently, Prof Tari expanded hisindustry collaboration to much larger entreprise and successfully secured larger funds (i.e. >$1M each) to tackle new challenges of Blockchain systems with regards security, performance, and scalability.
He also has the following qualifications:
Prof Tari focuses on the design of innovative solutions related to large-scale systems; such Cloud/IoT/Edge and critical systems (e.g. SCADA, Smart Grid). He particularly interested investigating both analytical/mathematical and computational models that can address the complex issues related to robustness of such large-scale systems from security, performance, and reliability perspectives.
General areas: Cloud, Edge, IoT
Specific topics: Cybersecurity, Performance, Reliability
The research impact of Prof Tari’s research outputs in large-scale systems cannot only be measured by the quality and quantity of publications, but also in citation metrics. For example, as of 2021, he has an h-index=41 and h10-index=166. I have 13 papers with >100 citations and am currently receiving over 700 citations per year. The citations for my publications are on the way-up, particularly reflecting the quality, quantity and relevance of the publications.
Prof Tari received over $11M in funding from the ARC (Australian Research Council) and local/international companies (e.g., Siemens/Germany). Some of the funded worked were commercialised as industry large-scale products (e.g,. MetaCDN as is a pioneering “4th generation” ContentDelivery Network system).
ACM Computing Surveys, 53(2):40:1-40:37
J. Suaboot, A. Alharthi, Z. Tari, J. Grundy, A.N. Mahmood, A. Almalawi, A. Zomaya and K. Drira. (2020).
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), 16(3):211-2124
T. Zhang, T. Zhu, P. Xiong, H. Hoo, Z. Tari and W. Zhou: Correlated Differential Privacy. (2020).
Elsevier Journal on Computing Security, 92:101773
Suaboot, Z. Tari, A.N. Mahmood, A. Y. Zomaya, and W. Li. (2020).
Supported by - ARC (Australian Research Council)
Funding - Australian Department of Industry Innovation and Science
Funding - AU2EU (Australia to European)
Most of Prof Tari's projects are funded by the ARC (Australian Research Council) and various IT industries (e.g., Siemens/Germany), which includes the followings:
Acknowledgement of Country
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
Acknowledgement of Country
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.