Sara Khalifa

Dr Sara Khalifa is a research scientist at Data61|CSIRO (formerly known as NICTA) and a co-joint lecturer at UNSW. Her current research interests include ubiquitous and pervasive computing, smart wearables, Internet of Things, and energy harvesting.

She received a PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from University of New South Wales, Sydney in 2016. For her PhD thesis entitled “Energy Efficient Human Activity Recognition for self-powered Wearable devices”, Sara received the 2017 John Makepeace Bennett Award which is awarded by CORE (Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia) to the best PhD dissertation of the year within Australia and New Zealand in the field of Computer Science. She is also the recipient of the 2017 NSW iAwards Mobility Innovation of the year, 2017 NSW iAwards Research and Development Project of the year, the 2016 Commended Australian NASSCOM Innovation Award, the 2015 CISRA Best Research Paper Award, among others.

She has authored more than 20 papers in the area of pervasive computing and pattern recognition. She has been a reviewer of a number of conference papers and journals. She received a postdoctoral writing fellowship from NICTA (Dec 2015-Mar 2016) and worked as a research assistant (Sep 2015-Nov 2015) at CSE, UNSW. She received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from Zagazig University, Egypt in 2007 and 2011 respectively. She has secured First Class with Distinction throughout her studies. She was a Lecturer Assistant in the Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, Egypt from September 2007- January 2012. During this period, Sara taught various Computer Science subjects and worked as a co-Supervisor for several undergraduate student projects.