Dr. Kathleen Keogh
Deputy Head of Information Technology
Campus
Biography
Dr Kathleen Keogh is the Deputy Head of IT discipline and engages with multiple industry partners regarding cooperative education activities include co-design, co-development, co-delivery of curriculum and internship opportunities for students.
Kathleen was the course coordinator for the undergraduate 'Earn as You Learn' program – Bachelor of IT (Professional Practice) course for many years. In this course, students engage with industry partners, including IBM, Kyndryl and Westpac with paid internship experience over more than two years while studying. Kathleen manages the relationship with industry partners in support of this work integrated learning and has onboarded new industry internship partners in recent years including NAB and ISI.
Kathleen majored in Computer Science and Mathematics in her undergraduate Science degree, graduating with an Honours degree in Computer Science from James Cook University. Following some years working with CSIRO in Canberra, Kathleen then embarked on further postgraduate research at The University of Melbourne.
Kathleen completed a research Master of Science thesis conducting a study of human cognitive behaviour in disturbance management. She built a simulation system to partially model human expertise in complex reasoning.
Kathleen’s PhD research involved exploring issues in the organisation of collaborative software agents and emergent teams including people and artificial agents working in dynamic situations. Kathleen studied approaches that enable intelligent software agents to behave flexibly after observing unexpected changes in their environment. She proposed new organisational constructs to support improvised agent behaviour, and demonstrated viability of the approach through experimentation. Her work contributes to the analysis and design of complex sociotechnical systems.
Fields of research
- Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
- Data mining and knowledge discovery
- Intelligent robotics
More about Kathleen
Qualifications
- Bachelor of Science, James Cook University
- Bachelor of Science(Honours), James Cook University
- Graduate Diploma Education, Australian Catholic University
- Master of Science, The University of Melbourne
- PhD, The University of Melbourne
Areas of interest
- Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems
- Artificial intelligence
- Computational modelling and simulation
- Computational linguistics
Areas of expertise
Kathleen's research interests include using artificial agents and multiagent systems to model human behaviour. She has explored coordination capabilities of artificial agent organisations in simulations of complex situations.
Kathleen has been collaborating with colleagues in computational linguistics and education to create simulation models of children’s language acquisition. Using data science and agent modelling they create and use models to investigate the relationships between exposure to language vocabulary from books and language comprehension in young children.
Awards
- 2025 and 2026: IBM Champion
Current
- PhD student, Federation University, ‘Multimodal brain graph representation learning‘, associate supervisor.
Past
- PhD student, Federation University, ‘Efficient Memoryless Local Planning for Quadrotor Navigation’, associate supervisor.
- Computer programming (Java, Python)
- Software engineering
- Agile project management (Scrum)
- Capstone projects
Centre for Smart Analytics (CSA)
- Publications
Non-Conservative Efficient Collision Checking and Depth Noise-Awareness for Trajectory Planning
- Journals
- DOI reference: 10.1109/LRA.2025.3580318
Crowdsourced and AI-generated age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for vocabulary in print: Extending the Kuperman et al. (2012) norms
- Journals
- DOI reference: 10.3758/s13428-025-02843-8