Alumnus wins Australian Computer Society Eureka Prize

Jon Patrick, an alumnus from the Faculty of Information Technology has recently been awarded the 'Australian Computer Society Eureka Prize for ICT Innovation' for the development of his online fraud detection system, Scamseek.

Scamseek uses search engines to scour the web, studying the semantics of text to detect and process financial scam documents. It helps the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) by saving hundreds of hours of manually sorting through web content.

Professor Patrick holds a PhD from Monash University which he completed in 1978 with a study of the geomerty of prehistoric stone circles using minimal message length encoding ( MML ). Since then he worked with many organisations including Deakin University and the University of the Basque Country and has developed systems which have been adapted for use by the  Australian Institute of Sport. He currently holds the position of Sybase Chair of Information Systems at the University of Sydney.

In 1998 he also sat on the Committee of School reviews for Monash University, Faculty of Information Technology.

More information on Scamseek is available here :
http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~lkmrl/scamseek.htm