Breaking codes, and barriers.

Farina Riaz builds machine learning models that run on quantum circuits, and she has spent her career making that frontier useful outside the lab. Her research spans quantum generative models, quantum filters for image classification, and the security questions that both quantum computing and AI raise.

Her doctorate at the University of Southern Queensland started in vehicle-to-vehicle communication. In January 2021 a CSIRO Data61 top-up scholarship let her change course into quantum artificial intelligence, a field with no established research group at either institution. She became the first PhD student at UniSQ and at CSIRO to work in it, and finished in June 2023 under Dr Shahab Abdulla, supported by her CSIRO supervisors and an international quantum expert.

She then spent three years at CSIRO's Data61 as a CERC Postdoctoral Fellow, developing quantum variational autoencoders for time series anomaly detection and quantum pre-processing filters for image classification, and helping make CSIRO a national reference point for quantum AI. She also set up CSIRO's first Industry PhD in quantum machine learning, with Food Ladder and UniSQ.

Today she is Senior Lecturer and Master of IT Program Coordinator at the Australian International Institute of Higher Education, and continues at CSIRO as a Visiting Scientist. She supervises PhD researchers in quantum AI, has published more than 19 peer-reviewed papers, and reviews for leading journals.

Before the doctorate she completed postgraduate study in computer software engineering, interned at CERN in Switzerland, worked as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer at NERO AG in Germany, and lectured at several universities for four years.