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:
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, 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.
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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.
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