UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is excited to welcome three new academic staff members: Dr Benjamin Tag, Dr Rachid Hamadi, and Dr Thomas Sewell. They each bring unique experience, and we are looking forward to their contributions to our school.
Dr Tag works in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, and Human-AI interaction. Before joining UNSW, Ben lectured at Monash University and was a postdoc in Ubiquitous Computing at the University of Melbourne. He earned his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Keio University, Japan.
His research explores how intelligent systems shape our daily lives, with a strong focus on emotion regulation, cognitive psychology, and context-aware computing. Dr Tag deploys emerging technologies that enhance our understanding of mental and physical states, with a particular interest in mental state assessments in both virtual and natural environments. He’s always open for a coffee, or a conversation about music, swimming, or late-night comedy!
Dr Rachid Hamadi is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2005 from UNSW. He also holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science obtained in 1995 and a B.Sc. (with Honours) in Computer Science obtained in 1991 both from the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene (USTHB), Algeria. Prior to joining UNSW, he held Lecturer positions at Federation University, Victoria University, Central Queensland University, and USTHB (Algeria). His primary areas of teaching are Programming, Databases, Web Technologies, Software Engineering, and Capstone Projects.
His research focuses on formal modeling of business processes, exception handling, analysis and verification, and service-oriented computing. He has published in esteemed international journals and conferences, contributing significantly to these fields.
Dr Thomas Sewell is a software verification expert working at CSE.
Dr Sewell has worked in the field of software verification since 2006, and has contributed to major verification projects, include the seL4 verified microkernel and the CakeML verified compiler. These were significant milestone projects in the field, and remain to this day some of the most substantial pieces of software to have been proven correct.
He worked for the UNSW lab of the NICTA research organisation from 2006-2012, working mostly on seL4. He completed his PhD at UNSW from 2013 - 2017, working on the binary analysis of seL4. He was a postdoc at Chalmers University in Sweden 2018-2020, working on dynamic evaluation in the CakeML environment. He then moved to Cambridge University in the UK and worked on CPU security proofs and proof systems for the C language in 2020-2024.
Dr Sewell returned to UNSW in 2024, and rejoined the Trustworthy Systems group where he is working on the Pancake language (part of the CakeML family) and proofs about systems running on seL4.
He is an expert user of the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover, and also the HOL4 system and SMT-based approaches. At UNSW he teaches on topics such as theorem proving and programming language semantics.