Robert Layton is a husband and father of two living in regional Western 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:

• Data Scientist and Director at DataPipeline
• Vice-president of the Ballarat Hackerspace
• Startup builder, predominately technical assistance, through Eurekative
• Python trainer with Python Charmers
• Cofounder of Pro-tekt vehicle tracking systems
• Runs meetups and coworking in Ballarat, Australia through Silicon Beach Ballarat and ballarat.tech
• Honorary Research Fellow at Federation University Australia’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory

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:

• Federation University Australia's Inaugural Young Alumni of the Year
• Presented at multiple Pycon AU events, with highly engaging talks
• Authored two revisions of Learning Data Mining with Python
• Supervised multiple PhD and Master’s students to completion
• Over 1350 citations on published research papers

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:

• Email him at firstnamelastname@gmail.com (replace with name).
• Email him at firstname@datapipeline.com.au (replace with name) for any commercial projects.
• On Twitter @robertlayton
• On the Ballarat Hackerspace Slack channel
• On the ballarat.tech Mattermost instance

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, for ever.

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.

PhD Research 2008 - 2011

Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, Federation University Australia

I completed my PhD between 2008 to 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 of the important chapters have been released independently as published research.