Rate My Professor Zahir Tari

Professor Zahir Tari is a Professor in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University and serves as the Research Director of the RMIT Centre of Cyber Security Research and Innovation, leading major research and development activities in cybersecurity across STEM, business, and design colleges. Previously, he was Associate Dean and Discipline Head of the Distributed Systems and Networking discipline, now known as Cloud, Systems, and Security, for over 14 years, during which it ranked fourth in the 2018 ERA rankings for Distributed Systems. Appointed as a member of the ARC College of Experts from 2022 to 2026, Tari has supervised 31 PhD students to completion, mentored nine postdoctoral fellows, and three research assistants. His collaborations with industries, including Siemens in Germany, have yielded over AUD 21 million in research funding through ARC Discovery and Linkage grants, ARC Research Hub, CRC-P projects, ARC LIEF, and Department of Industry grants, with innovations like MetaCDN leading to commercialisation.

Tari's research focuses on innovative solutions for large-scale distributed systems such as Cloud, IoT, and Edge computing, and critical systems including SCADA and Smart Grids, addressing security, performance, scalability, and reliability via analytical and computational models. His contributions integrate human and system perspectives into cybersecurity, advancing anomaly detection and system survivability. Key publications include 'A survey of clustering algorithms for big data: Taxonomy and empirical analysis' (2014, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing), 'TON_IoT telemetry dataset: A new generation dataset of IoT and IIoT for data-driven intrusion detection systems' (2020, IEEE Access), 'SCADASim—A framework for building SCADA simulations' (2011, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid), 'MetaCDN: Harnessing ‘Storage Clouds’ for high performance content delivery' (2009, Journal of Network and Computer Applications), and 'Blockchain-based federated learning for securing internet of things: A comprehensive survey' (2023, ACM Computing Surveys). These works have had substantial impact in cybersecurity and distributed computing fields.