Dr Robert Layton

Robert Layton is a Data Scientist and Entrepreneur from Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. He is currently the Chief Research Officer at BRAIN (Ballarat Region Artificial Intelligence Network), investigating AI's impact on regional communities. He earned a PhD in cybercrime analytics from the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, at Federation University Australia.

BRAIN BRAIN - Ballarat Region AI Network Chief Research Officer DataPipeline DataPipeline Data Scientist & Director Ballarat Hackerspace Ballarat Hackerspace Member Eurekative Eurekative Startup Builder Python Charmers Python Charmers Python Trainer Protekt GPS Protekt GPS Co-Founder ICSL ICSL - Federation University Honorary Research Fellow Ballarat Tech & Silicon Beach Community Organizer

Robert's interests lie in data analytics, cybersecurity, and programming, with applications to data mining, robotics, web application programming and more. His main skills are in data mining with text data, cybersecurity analytics, software and web development with python, and programming training. His particular expertise in cybersecurity analytics combines his PhD research in cybercrime analytics with practical experience in threat detection and analysis.

Robert's main accomplishments to date include:

Robert has also served on the Committee for Ballarat Consultative Panel for the past two years, providing community perspectives and contributing to regional advocacy and capacity building initiatives.

Robert's main goals for the future are to build Ballarat's startup culture and help people create their dream technology and businesses in regional areas. If you are interested in helping achieve this goal, please get in contact.

Contacting

If you'd like to get in contact, there are a few different ways:

Please note that Robert is not currently taking employment offers but is interested in consultancy and project work.

Ballarat Hackerspace

The Ballarat Hackerspace is a non-profit community organisation created to help introduce future technology to Ballarat. Additionally, the hackerspace provides a workshop where members can come and build their projects in a friendly, collaborative and engaging environment. Members of the Ballarat Hackerspace have created lots of great projects, bouncing ideas off each other and helping each other.

The Ballarat Hackerspace is a supportive environment with a clear code of conduct and supports all people using the space. Initiatives on this front include the ability for members to bring in their kids under their membership (although the guardiant is responsible for them), and Women's Wednesdays, where women can use the space for free, forever.

The Ballarat Hackerspace has become a central nexus for technology activity in Ballarat, working with local Universities, schools, organisations, community leaders and businesses. It is funded through memberships and sponsorships, and has been running for over three years.

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Research

Dr Layton has an extensive research background. As of January 2023, he has a h-index of 21 and an i10 index of 30. In total his papers have 3,462 citations.

View Google Scholar Profile.

PhD Research 2008 - 2011

Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, Federation University Australia

I completed my PhD between 2008 and 2011 in the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory at Federation University Australia. My Supervisor for the project was Professor Paul Watters and Associate Supervisor was Associate Professor Richard Dazeley. In the project I worked with Westpac Banking Corporation and other partners on real data and real problems in cybercrime.

My PhD research investigated the use of Authorship Analysis to link together cyberattacks, specifically investigating phishing attacks. The work predominately used unsupervised cluster analysis to achieve the goal of clustering attacks by author. I also developed new techniques on authorship analysis, including Recentred Local Profiles.

I also performed other experiments on authorship, including my most cited work on authorship analysis in twitter messages. In that work I showed that high accuracy can be obtained on tweets, despite them being about 100 times shorter than other documents previously studied in the area.

My thesis was accepted with only minor changes and I received my doctorate degree in 2012. While I cannot release the thesis or datasets, all the important chapters have been released independently as published research.

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Other Achievements: