Keogh, Kathleen (Dr)

Kathleen Keogh

Position: Lecturer
Discipline: Information Technology
Phone: 03 5327 9121
Email:k.keogh@federation.edu.au

Qualifications

  • PhD (Melb)
  • MSc (Melb)
  • BSc(Hons) (JCU)
  • DipEd (ACU)

Biography

Kathleen studied Computer Science, graduating with an Honours degree from James Cook University in 1988. Kathleen then embarked on postgraduate research at The University of Melbourne, following a number of years working with CSIRO in Canberra. She has taught computer science courses in programming, software engineering, project management, database systems and capstone projects at the University of Melbourne, the University of Ballarat and currently at Federation University of Australia. As part of the capstone projects courses, Kathleen manages students working in teams following scrum methodology to develop solutions for clients drawn from community, industry and academia. Kathleen is the program coordinator for the undergraduate 'Earn as You Learn' program – Bachelor of IT (Professional Practice). In this program, students engage with industry partners, IBM and Kyndryl with paid internship experience over more than 2 years whilst studying. Kathleen manages the relationship with industry partners in support of this work integrated learning.

Kathleen's research interests include using artificial agents and multiagent systems to model human behaviour. She has explored coordination capabilities of artificial agent organisations in simulations of complex situations. Kathleen completed a research Master of Science degree in 2002. Her thesis was a study of human cognitive behaviour in disturbance management. She built a simulation system to partially model human expertise in complex reasoning. Kathleen’s PhD research involved exploring issues in the organisation of collaborative software agents and emergent teams including people and artificial agents working in dynamic situations. Kathleen studied approaches that enable intelligent software agents to behave flexibly after observing unexpected changes in their environment. She proposed new organisational constructs to support improvised agent behaviour, and demonstrated viability of the approach through experimentation. Her work contributes to the analysis and design of complex sociotechnical systems.

Teaching areas

  • Programming
  • Software Engineering
  • Capstone Projects

Extended research profile