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.