Stylus: Katina Michael
Qualifications:
BIT, MTransCrimePrev, PhD
PhD:
PhD in the School of Information Technology and Computer Science, Faculty of Informatics
Thesis Short Title: The Automatic Identification Trajectory
Year Awarded PhD: 2003
Current Role:
Associate Professor in the School of Information Systems and Technology, Faculty of Informatics, University of Wollongong
Current Research Interest:
The Socio-ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies; The Technological Trajectory of Automatic Identification, Location-Based Services, Wearable Computing and Embedded Systems; National Security; Emergency Management
Official URL: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kmichael
Previous Employment:
United Technologies, Andersen Consulting, Nortel Networks, University of Wollongong
Year Begun Lecturing: 2002
Family Details: Married to Dr M.G. Michael. Katina and Michael are the proud parents of George, Eleni and Jeremy.
Associate Professor Katina Michael graduated from St Spyridon College in 1993 as the Inaugural School Captain and School Dux. She received the second highest HSC score in 2 Unit Geography in NSW, and the following year she gained entrance into the competitive Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) at the University of Technology, Sydney. The BIT course offered an attractive cooperative scholarship and among the 400 applications received nationwide, Katina was chosen among a 24 student cohort. In her final semester of undergraduate study Katina was hired by Canadian networking giant, Nortel Networks, as an engineer initially and then as a senior network and business planner. It was in her role at Nortel that Katina travelled throughout Asia and North America, seconded abroad to aid in tender responses which were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2001, the CEO of Nortel Networks recognised Katina as top talent in Asia, among a 90,000 strong workforce.
In 2002, Katina joined the University of Wollongong as a lecturer specialising in networking and e-business related research, and thereafter the social implications of emerging technologies. In 2003, Katina was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy on the topic of automatic identification. She studied the technological trajectory of five auto-ID technologies including bar code, magnetic-stripe cards, smart cards, biometrics and radio-frequency identification tags and transponder implants. In 2007 Katina was awarded a postgraduate scholarship from the University of Wollongong to study toward a Masters of Transnational Crime Prevention in the Faculty of Law. In 2009 she graduated from this degree with a high distinction average and was awarded the prize for the highest aggregate mark. In the same year, a term that MG Michael coined and Katina helped to define in concept, “uberveillance,” entered Australia’s official national dictionary, the Macquarie, and was voted technology word of the year in the online competition of 2008.
In 2007 Katina was one of Australia’s youngest recipients ever to be honoured with senior membership of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She is an editorial board member of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, the technical editor of the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER), and a board member of the Australian Privacy Foundation, among numerous other posts.
She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant on the topic of Location Based Service Regulation in Australia being awarded an A+ by the external panel and 200,000 in research funds. She is a prolific writer having completed over 85 peer reviewed papers in a range of high impact journals, more recently in the 98 year old acclaimed Proceedings of the IEEE.
She has also co-authored with MG Michael a 500 pp reference volume titled: Innovative Automatic Identification and Location Based Services: from Bar Codes to Chip Implants (2009), and will be following this up with a co-edited volume titled: Uberveillance: The Social Implications of Emerging Technologies (2011). Katina has been the guest editor of numerous special issue journals including: Proceedings of the IEEE, Computer Communications, Prometheus, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, JTAER.
She has numerous overseas collaborations going and is well-known for her five year workshop series on the Social Implications of National Security. In 2010 she was the program chair of the IEEE Symposium on Technology and Society which she hosted at the University of Wollongong on the theme of Emerging Technologies, the first time the conference had ever been hosted in the southern hemisphere. Katina has had more than 25 honours, masters by research and PhD student completions under her primary supervision in the last 9 years.
Citation: Katina Michael, "Past Students and Role Models", Stylus, June 21, 2011, p. 18-19.