Robert Layton is a Data Scientist and Entrepreneur from Ballarat,
Victoria, Australia.
He earned a PhD in cybercrime analytics from the Internet Commerce
Security Laboratory, at Federation
University Australia.
Professionally, he wears a number of hats:
Robert’s interests lie in data analytics and programming, with
applications to data mining, robotics, web
application programming and more.
His main skills are in data mining with text data, software and web
development with python, and programming
training.
Robert’s main accomplishments to date include:
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.
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: