Flora Salim

Professor Flora Salim

Professor, Data Science; Deputy Director, Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics

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Profile photo of Flora Salim smiling towards the camera against an out of focus background. Flora is wearing a black shirt with a blue jacket.

Contact details

STEMSchool of Computing Technologies


Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics


ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society


Emailflora.salim@rmit.edu.au


Phone: +61 39925 0291


Phone: +61 43043 8181


Campus: Melbourne City


Programs

More information

Profile photo of Flora Salim smiling towards the camera against an out of focus background. Flora is wearing a black shirt with a blue jacket.

Contact details

STEMSchool of Computing Technologies


Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics


ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society


Emailflora.salim@rmit.edu.au


Phone: +61 39925 0291


Phone: +61 43043 8181


Campus: Melbourne City


Programs

More information

Flora Salim’s research is in the cross-cutting areas of human behaviour modelling, machine learning with multimodal time-series and spatio-temporal data, and AI on the edge (IoT, sensors, wearables, digital systems and infrastructures).

Overview

Flora Salim is a Professor in the School of Computing Technologies, the co-Deputy Director of RMIT Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics (CIDDA), and an Associate Investigator of ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society. Flora leads the Context Recognition and Urban Intelligence (CRUISE) group.

Flora's research interests include machine learning on stream and sensor data, behaviour modelling, time-series and spatio-temporal data mining, mobility data science, and ubiquitous computing. She has received more than $10M in research funding in the last 10 years. Her research has been funded by Australian Research Council (ARC), Victorian Government, Microsoft Research, Northrop Grumman Corporation US, Rheinmetall Defence Australia, Qatar National Priorities Research Program, IBM Research, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bayer Foundation, city councils, and several other industry and local government partners.

She was a Humboldt-Bayer Fellow, Humboldt Fellow (experienced researcher), Victoria Fellow, the recipient of the RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Award for Research Excellence–Early Career Researcher 2016; the RMIT Award for Research Impact - Technology 2018; the RMIT School of Science HDR Supervision Excellence Award 2017; Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Research Industry (APDI) Fellow (2012-2015), and IBM Smarter Planet Industry Skills Innovation Award (2010).

She serves as Associate Editor of the PACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Area Editor of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and a Steering Committee member of ACM UbiComp. She was a Visiting Professor at University of Kassel, Germany, and University of Cambridge, England, in 2019.

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Industry experience

Senior software engineer, mediaproxy and Xenon Systems

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Research

Her expertise lies at the intersection of ubiquitous computing (on capturing and modelling human mobility and dynamic user behaviours) and data science and machine learning (particularly on time-series, spatiotemporal, and multimodal sensor data). She has many years of experience in analysing human behaviours in multiple contexts and developing key techniques to enable situational awareness for stakeholders and personalised intelligent assistance for the end users. She always take user-centric approaches of data capture and analysis in modelling and profiling human behaviours. Given the nexus of the two research areas, her research contributions on human behaviour (including mobility) modelling have been largely published in the pervasive/ubiquitous computing venues (including UbiComp/IMWUT, PerCom, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and IEEE IoT Journal), and the contributions in machine learning with time-series, spatio-temporal, and trajectory data have been published in NeurIPS, WWW, KDD, WSDM, TKDE, PAKDD, and many more.

Research keywords

Machine learning, Deep learning, Time-series, Sensor data, Spatio-temporal data, Ubiquitous computing, Mobility, Data science, Behaviour modelling, Human activity Recognition, Trajectory, Forecasting, Predictive analytics, Emotion sensing, Wearable computing, Trustworthy AI, Fairness in machine learning, Explainable AI

Research output summary

150+

Publications

$10 million+

Projects

9

Awards

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Supervisor interest areas

  • Deep learning for time-series and sensor data
  • Large-scale/urban-scale event detection and forecasting with heterogeneous time-series for mobility and related behaviours (e.g. energy, public health)
  • Fair and explainable machine learning
  • Human behaviour, emotion, health, wellbeing sensing with wearables
  • Personalisation and mobile-based and POI recommender systems

Supervisor projects

  •  Self-supervised learning for multimodal data
  • Forecasting with heterogeneous time-series
  • Representation learning with uncertainty
  • Disentanglement representation learning for spatio-temporal data
  • Spatio-temporal representation learning for situational awareness and traffic flow forecasting
  • Behaviour and emotion sensing with wearables
  • Graph and sequential embedding learning
  • Mobile information behaviour and intent modelling

Feature publications

MobTCast: Leveraging auxiliary trajectory forecasting for human mobility prediction

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

 H. Xue, F. D. Salim, Y.Ren, and N.Oliver. (2021).

Exploring self-supervised representation ensembles for covid-19 cough classification

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2021, pp. 1944-1952

H. Xue and F. D. Salim. (2021).

Time-series change point detection with self-supervised contrastive predictive coding

Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW 2021)

S. Deldari, D. V. Smith, H. Xue, and F. D. Salim. (2021).

Key publications by year

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  • H. Xue, F. D. Salim, Y. Ren, C. Clarke, “Translating Human Mobility Forecasting through Natural Language Generation”, to appear in 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM’22), 2022.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  • Xue, H., Salim, F.D., Ren, Y. and Oliver, N., 2021, September. MobTCast: Leveraging Auxiliary Trajectory Forecasting for Human Mobility Prediction. In Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)
  • Li, M., Cai, W., Liu, R., Weng, Y., Zhao, X., Wang, C., Chen, X., Liu, Z., Pan, C., Li, M. and Liu, Y., 2021, August. FFA-IR: Towards an Explainable and Reliable Medical Report Generation Benchmark. In Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track (Round 2).
  • Abushaqra, F.M., Xue, H., Ren, Y. and Salim, F.D., 2021. PIETS: Parallelised Irregularity Encoders for Forecasting with Heterogeneous Time-Series. IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2021.
  • H. Xue and F. D. Salim, “Exploring self-supervised representation ensembles for covid-19 cough classification,” in ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2021, pp. 1944-1952.
  • Khaokaew, Y., Rahaman, M.S., White, R.W. and Salim, F.D., 2021, October. CoSEM: Contextual and Semantic Embedding for App Usage Prediction. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (pp. 3137-3141).
  • S. Deldari, D. V. Smith, H. Xue, and F. D. Salim, “Time-series change point detection with self-supervised contrastive predictive coding,” in Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW 2021). ACM, 2021.
  • Xue H, Salim FD. 2021. TERMCast: Temporal Relation Modeling for Effective Urban Flow Forecasting. In Proc. 25th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD-2021).

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Bedogni, L., Rumi, S.K. and Salim, F.D., 2021. Modelling Memory for Individual Re-identification in Decentralised Mobile Contact Tracing Applications, in Proc. of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 5(1), pp.1-21.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  • Qin KK, Salim FD, Ren Y, Shao W, Heimann M, Koutra D. G-CREWE: Graph CompREssion With Embedding for Network Alignment. In Proc. 24th Int’l Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2020.
  • Rumi SK, Salim FD. Modelling Regional Crime Risk using Directed Graph of Check-ins. In Proc. 24th Int’l Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2020.
  • Hamdi A, Salim F, Kim DY. DroTrack: High-speed Drone-based Object Tracking Under Uncertainty. The IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE) 2020 (Best Student Paper Award Finalist)
  • Wang X, Salim FD, Ren Y, Koniusz P. Relation Embedding for Personalised Translation-Based POI Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2020), Springer; 2020. p. 53–64.

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Saeed A, F. Salim, T. Ozcelebi, J. Lukkien. 2020, ‘Federated Self-Supervised Learning of Multi-Sensor Representations for Embedded Intelligence’, in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, ISSN: 2327-4662.
  • Deldari S, Smith DV, Sadri A, Salim FD. 2020, ‘ESPRESSO: Entropy and ShaPe awaRe timE-Series SegmentatiOn for processing heterogeneous sensor data’. In Proc. of the ACM Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 4, 3, Sep 2020.
  • Salim FD, Dong B, Ouf M, Wang Q, Pigliautile I, Kang X, et al. 2020, Modelling urban-scale occupant behaviour, mobility, and energy in buildings: A survey. Building and Environment.
  • Kaur MA, Salim FD, Ren Y, Chan J, Tomko M, Sanderson M. 2020, ‘Joint Modelling of Cyber Activities and Physical Context to Improve Prediction of Visitor Behaviors’. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.
  • Masoomeh, Z. Sadri, A. Ghafoori, Z. Moshtaghi, M. Salim, F. Leckie, C. and Ramamohanarao, K. 2020, 'Unsupervised online change point detection in high-dimensional time series', in Knowledge and Information Systems, Springer, v. 62, n. 2, pp. 719-750 ISSN: 0219-1377.
  • Rahaman, M. S., Liono, J., Ren, Y., Chan, J., Kudo, S., Rawling, T. and Salim, F. 2020, 'An Ambient-Physical System to Infer Concentration in Open-plan Workplace', in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, United States, pp. 1-10 ISSN: 2327-4662.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  • Liono J, Salim F, van Berkel N, Kostakos V. and Qin K. 2019, 'Improving Experience Sampling with Multi-view User-driven Annotation Prediction', in Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2019).
  • Shao, W. Salim, F. Chan, J. Qin, K. Ma, J. and Feest, B. 2019, 'OnlineAirTrajClus: An Online Aircraft Trajectory Clustering for Tarmac Situation Awareness', IEEE PerCom 2019.

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Hashem, T. Jahan, R. Salim, F. and Barua, S. 2019, 'Efficient trip scheduling algorithms for groups', in Information Systems, Elsevier, vol. 84, pp. 145-173 ISSN: 0306-4379.
  • Liono, J. Jayaraman, P. Qin, A. Nguyen, T. and Salim, F. 2019, 'QDaS: Quality driven data summarisation for effective storage management in Internet of Things', in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, United States, vol. 127, pp. 196-208 ISSN: 0743-7315.
  • Qin, K. Shao, W. Ren, Y. Chan, J. and Salim, F. 2019, 'Solving multiple travelling officers problem with population-based optimization algorithms', in Neural Computing and Applications, Springer, pp. 1-27.
  • Song, H. Qin, A. and Salim, F. 2019, 'Evolutionary model construction for electricity consumption prediction', in Neural Computing and Applications, Springer, pp. 1-18 ISSN: 0941-0643.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  • Priyogi, B. Sanderson, M. Salim, F. Chan, J. Tomko, M. and Ren, Y. 2018, 'Identifying In-App User Actions from Mobile Web Logs', in PAKDD 2018, pp. 300-311
  •  Rumi, S. Deng, K. and Salim, F. 2018, 'Theft prediction with individual risk factor of visitors', in Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL, pp. 552-555
  • Sarker, I. and Salim, F. 2018, 'Mining User Behavioral Rules from Smartphone Data through Association Analysis', in , in PAKDD 2018, pp. 450-461

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Sadri, A, Salim, FD, Ren, Y, Shao, W & Krumm, JC et al. 2018, ‘What Will You Do for the Rest of the Day?’, Proc. of the ACM on IMWUT, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 1–26.
  • Hashem, T, Hasan, R, Salim, F & Mahin, MT 2018, ‘Crowd-enabled Processing of Trustworthy, Privacy-Enhanced and Personalised Location Based Services with Quality Guarantee’, Proc. of the ACM on IMWUT, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 1–25.
  • Arief Ang, I. Hamilton, M. and Salim, F. 2018, 'A Scalable Room Occupancy Prediction with Transferable Time Series Decomposition of CO2 Sensor Data', in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, vol. 14, no. 3-4, pp. 1-28 ISSN: 1550-4859.
  • Ren, Y. Tomko, M. Salim, F. Chan, J. and Sanderson, M. 2018, 'Understanding the predictability of user demographics from cyber-physical-social behaviours in indoor retail spaces', in EPJ Data Science, Springer Open, Germany, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-21 ISSN: 2193-1127.
  • Ren, Y. Tomko, M. Salim, F. Chan, J. Clarke, C. and Sanderson, M. 2018, 'A location-query-browse graph for contextual recommendation', in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE, United States, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 204-218 ISSN: 1041-4347.
  • Rumi, S. Deng, K. and Salim, F. 2018, 'Crime event prediction with dynamic features', in EPJ Data Science, SpringerOpen, Germany, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-27 ISSN: 2193-1127.
  • Shao, W. Salim, F. Gu, T. Dinh, T. and Chan, J. 2018, 'Travelling officer problem: managing car parking violations efficiently using sensor data', in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, United States, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 802-810 ISSN: 2327-4662.
  • Shao, W. Nguyen, T. Qin, K. Youssef, M. and Salim, F. 2018, 'BLEDoorGuard: A Device-Free Person Identification Framework Using Bluetooth Signals for Door Access', in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, United States, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 5227-5239 ISSN: 2327-4662.

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Rahaman, M. Mei, Y. Hamilton, M. and Salim, F. 2017, 'CAPRA: A contour-based accessible path routing algorithm', in Information Sciences, Elsevier, United States, vol. 385-386, pp. 157-173.
  • Ren, Y. Tomko, M. Salim, F. Ong, K. and Sanderson, M. 2017, 'Analyzing web behavior in indoor retail spaces', in Association for Information Science and Technology Journal, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 62-76.
  • Sadri, A. Salim, F. Ren, Y. Masoomeh, Z. Chan, J. and Sellis, T. 2017, 'Shrink: Distance preserving graph compression', in Information Systems, Elsevier, v. 69, pp. 180-193.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  • Nguyen, T. Nguyen, V. Salim, F. and Phung, D. 2016, 'SECC: Simultaneous extraction of context and community from pervasive signals', in Proc. of the 14th Intl’l Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2016), IEEE, United States, pp. 1-9

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Shao, W. Salim, F. Song, A. and Bouguettaya, A. 2016, 'Clustering big spatiotemporal-interval data', in IEEE Transactions on Big Data, IEEE, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 190-203 ISSN: 2332-7790.
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Feature projects

ARC Discovery Project DP190101485 “Multi-Resolution Situation Recognition for Urban-aware Smart Assistant”

Funding - Australian Research Council

2019-2021

Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Institute, “A cyber physical socially-aware Personal Assistant”

Funding - Microsoft Research (USA)

2018 - 2019

Deep Intelligence Machine Simulator (DimSim)

Funding - Rheinmetall Defence Australia

2020 - 2021

Key projects by year

  • ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision Making in Society
    Associate Investigator
    2021-2027
  • Digitisation for Safe Workplaces
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: The Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund (VHESIF) grant, The Victorian government, $1,499,325
    2021-2022 
  • Precinct level (or city level) en-ergy use prediction using building data and other source
    SoleChief Investigator
    Funding: C4NET, co-funded by CSIRO, $144,000
    2021-2022 
  • INdus-trial and commercial demand FLEXing to Increase Overall beNefit (INFLEXION)
    Chief Investigator
    Fundin: C4NET, co-funded by Gippsland Water and GWMWater, $300,000
    2021-2022

  • Deep Intelligence Machine Simulator
    Chief Investigator,
    Funding: Rheinmetall Defence Australia, $1.5M
    2020-2021
  • NEXUS: Explainable and Unified Spatial Reasoning and Sensor Fusion
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: DST Intelligent Decision Superiority (iDS) Autonomous Processing and Rea-soning project, $1,095,186
    2020-2021
  • DroneCMS: Flying In-frastructure for Intelligent Crowd Management and Security for Mega Events
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: Qatar National Priorities Research Program (NPRP), $147,563
    2020-2021

  • Multi-Resolution Situation Recognition for Urban-aware Smart Assistant
    LeadChief Investigator
    Funding: ARC Discovery Project DP190101485, Australian Research Council, $393,325
    2019-2021
  • Smart Parking and Amenities for High Demand Area
    LeadChief Investigator
    Funding: Smarter City and Suburb Program (SCSP) grant, co-funded by Mornington Peninsula Shire, $1,000,000
    2019-2020 
  • Innovation Connection Grant
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: Archistar, $100,000
    2019
  • Pursuing a Predictable Workforce in a Dynamic Geopolitical Re-gion, with an Evolving Labour Market
    Sole Chief Investigator
    Funding: APR, Royal Australian Airforce, $26,000
    2019-2020 

  • Efficient Temporal Segmentation in Mining Big Time Series for Accurate Prediction of Heterogeneous Activities and Event
    SoleChief Investigator
    Funding: CSIRO Data61 PhD Scholarship, $129,787
    2018-2021
  • Clustering Heterogeneous Trajectories from Multi-domain Spatio-temporal Data
    Sole Chief Investigator
    Funding: CSIRO Data61 PhD Scholarship, $129,787
    2018-2021
  • A cyber physical socially-aware Personal Assistant
    Co-Lead Chief Investigator, Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Institute
    Funding: Microsoft Research (USA), $327,500
    2018-2019
  • Business Process Development, Information Management and DataA nalytics for Performance Benchmarking
    SoleChief Investigator, APR
    Funding: F Salim, Aurecon, $20,500
    2018 

  • Behaviour Analytics of Indoor Occupants to Optimise and Personalise Activity Based Working
    LeadChief Investigator
    Funding: Arup and RMIT ECP Opportunity, $196,518.68
    2017-2018
  • Spatio-temporal Data Analytics for Situation Awareness
    Lead Chief Investigator
    Funding: Australia Triton Industry Capability Program Research Grant Northrop Grumman Corporation, USA
    $134,000
    2017-2018
  • Pedestrian Analytics Project
    Sole Chief Investigator
    Funding: City of Melbourne, $19,411.70
    2017

  • Swarming: micro-flight data capture and analysis
    ARC Linkage Project LP150100246
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: $313,436 from Australian Research Council, $90,000 from Aurecon
    2015-2019 

  • Online Infrastructure for iCO2mmunity
    Lead Chief Investigator
    Funding: RMIT, Siemens, Victorian Greener Government Building Fund, $490,442
    2014-2016 
  • The Greener Office and Classroom
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: RMIT, Siemens, Victorian GreenerGovernment Building Fund, $106,383
    2014-2016
  • Buildings engineered for urban sustainability
    Chief Investigator
    Funding: RMIT, Siemens, Victorian Greener Government Building Fund, $690,095
    2014-2016
  • VizUrban
    Lead Chief Investigator
    Funding: AURIN Lens 10 project, AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network), $105,000
    2014 

  • Innovative Road Safety Technologies
    Co-Lead Investigator, multiple research contracts
    Funding: Mornington Peninsula Shire, >$100,000
    2013-2016

  • An Integrated and Real-time Passenger Travel and Public Transport Service Information System
    ARC Linkage ProjectLP120200305,‘
    Chief Investigator & ARC Postdoctoral Fellow Industry (APDI)
    Funding: $510,000 from ARC, $102,000 from Arup
    2012-2016 

  • Travel Grant 2011
    Sole Chief Investigator
    Funding: Ian Potter Foundation , $3000
    2011 

  • Two Cities as a Living Lab
    Lead Chief Investigator
    Funding: IBM Smarter Planet Industry Skills Inno-vation Award 2010, IBM Research Labs, USA, US$10,000
    2010 
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Awards

Humboldt-Bayer Fellowship, Bayer Foundation, Germany

Award date: 2019-2020

Recipients: Flora Salim

Humboldt Fellow (Experienced Researcher), Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Germany

Award date: 2019

Recipients: Flora Salim

Victoria Fellow, Veski & Victorian Government

Award date: 2018

Recipients: Flora Salim

 

Key awards by year

  • 2021 PACM IMWUT Distinguished Paper Award for n-Gage paper

  • 2019 Humboldt-Bayer Fellowship, Bayer Foundation, Germany
  • 2019 Humboldt Fellowship (Experienced Researcher), Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Germany
  • 2019 RMIT Industry Media Star Award

  • 2018 Victoria Fellowship, from veski, Victoria Government
  • 2018 RMIT Award for Research Impact - Technology

  • 2016 RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence – Early Career Researcher

  • 2012 Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (Industry)

  • 2010 IBM Smarter Planet Industry Skills Innovation Award, IBM Research, USA
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Grants

  • Lead PI, ARC Discovery Project DP190101485, ’Multi-Resolution Situation Recognition for Urban-aware Smart Assistant’.
  • Co-Lead PI, Qatar National Priorities Research Project, DroneCMS: Flying Infrastructure for Intelligent Crowd Management
  • Co-Lead PI, Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Institute: a cyber physical socially-aware personal assistant, MSR, Microsoft.
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Public and media engagements

2021

2020

2019

2018

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torres strait flag

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.

aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

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.