Atrocity Prevention in a Time of Challenge

A public lecture by Mr Jeffrey Sizemore, Senior Human Rights Research Fellow and Independent policy advisor.

Tuesday, 12 May 2026 | 6pm-7pm | Fox Lecture Theatre, UWA Arts Building

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The elimination of the US Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, Conflict and Stabilization Bureau, and many offices in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor as well as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) represents a deliberate dismantling of America’s atrocity prevention architecture and enterprise. This removes much of the international capacity to address atrocity risk at a time when violence, authoritarianism, and atrocity risk is increasing globally.

This conversation will provide clear examples of what has been lost and the challenges that remain. Mr. Sizemore will also provide options and lines of effort where the international community, academia, civil society, and the private sector can step up to fill some of the gaps and vacuum left in the wake of America’s retreat.

Jeff Sizemore is a global leader on atrocity prevention training for practitioners and is currently the 2026 Mary Ming-Wing Lee Senior Human Rights Research Fellow at the University of Queensland School of Political Science and International Studies.

He has served as the Deputy Director in the Office of Security and Human Rights and as the Senior Advisor on Atrocity Prevention for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the United States Department of State. He led and coordinated the bureau’s atrocity prevention efforts, managing atrocity prevention training for the Department as well as working with interagency colleagues as part of the Atrocity Prevention Task Force. He represented the United States in multilateral atrocity prevention activities, building partnership with like-minded states and advocating for the necessity and value of prevention work.

Prior to joining the State Department, Jeff served for over 20 years in the United States Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer, retiring as a commander in 2020. Jeff received a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from the George Washington University in 2001 and a master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the United States Naval War College in 2012.

Jeff Sizemore is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, working with Professor Melanie O’Brien in the UWA Law School, and Dr Ky Gentry in the School of Social Sciences (Political Science and International Relations).

Expanded Photography

Speaker: Elke Reinhuber, Associate Professor for Expanded Photography, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong

Thursday, 14 May 2026 | 6pm-7pm, Fox Lecture Theatre, UWA

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This presentation examines contemporary photographic practice as an expanded field that exceeds the production of discrete images and unfolds across material, spatial, and temporal frameworks. Situating photography within a broader constellation of installation, moving image, print, and sculptural processes, the talk reflects on how photographic images operate when they are displaced from the conventions of the flat image and reconfigured within exhibition contexts.

Connected to artistic research and her recent practice-based projects, Elke Reinhuber discusses photography as a performative and material process, one that involves circulation, translation, and transformation rather than representation alone. The talk addresses questions of image ontology, materiality, and spectatorship, considering how photographic work engages with space, scale, sequencing, and embodiment, and how it negotiates the shifting conditions of display and reception in contemporary visual culture.

By foregrounding expanded photographic strategies, the presentation contributes to current debates in art and visual studies concerning the status of photography in relation to digital technologies, post-medium practice, and interdisciplinary modes of artistic research. Photography is more than just a 2-dimensional image on the wall. It is the foundation to expand into other dimensions and reach beyond visibility.

Media artist and scholar Elke Reinhuber teaches currently at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong as Associate Professor for Expanded Photography. She studied at UDK Berlin and holds a PhD from COFA/UNSW, Sydney for her exploration on choice, decisions and counterfactual thinking in media arts. Her award winning artistic research has been presented internationally at conferences, exhibitions and festivals.

Speaker: Dr Mubarak Shah, Director, Center for Research in Computer Vision, University of Central Florida.

18 May 2026, 6pm-7pm, Fox Lecture Theatre, UWA (Arts)

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Diffusion models have become a dominant paradigm for generating high-quality images and videos, and are now emerging as an alternative to traditional step-by-step (autoregressive) language generation. In this talk, Professor Shah will present his recent work on Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) for discrete sequence generation. MDMs refine many tokens in parallel, making them efficient—but they can lock in early mistakes due to limited context. Professor Shah will introduce CORE (Context-Robust Remaking), a training-free method that improves reliability at inference time. CORE identifies fragile tokens by testing how their predictions change when parts of the surrounding context are masked. Tokens that are highly sensitive are revised, leading to more accurate and robust outputs without retraining the model. He will then discuss Multimodal Diffusion Large Language Models (MDLLMs), which generate text conditioned on images. These models can suffer from “hallucinations,” producing text that is not grounded in the visual input. It will be shown this arises because models rely too heavily on language likelihood rather than visual evidence. To address this, he proposes VISAGE, a decoding method that encourages better alignment with visual content by promoting consistent attention to relevant image regions. Together, these approaches improve the quality and trustworthiness of diffusion-based generation.

Dr Mubarak Shah is the Trustee Chair Professor and founding Director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, NAI, IAPR, AAIA, and SPIE. His research spans generative AI and computer vision including topics such as agentic systems, large language and multimodal models, human activity recognition, visual tracking, geo-localization, crowd analysis, and object detection.

Professor Shah is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, working with Professor Ajmal Mian, School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Associate Professor Khyber Alam, School of Allied Health, and Dr Daochang Liu, School of Computer Science & Software Engineering

Tuesday 19 May 2026, 11am-12noon, Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research (North) McCusker Auditorium

The lecture will be followed by a buffet lunch, sponsored by the Bridge and BridgeTech Programs.

Join us for a public lecture exploring how academic, clinical and industry partnerships accelerate translation of health technologies into real-world impact.

Dr Anurag Mairal is Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Director of Global Translation and Outreach at the Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign, and Faculty Fellow and Lead for Technology Innovation and Impact at Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health. He leads initiatives applying the biodesign process to resource-constrained settings and creates opportunities for students, faculty, and fellows to address global healthcare needs. He co-founded Stanford courses on scaling health technology in low-resource settings and global Biodesign, and previously served as Associate Director of the Stanford-India and Singapore-Stanford Biodesign programs.  

Professor Mairal’s visit to Perth is supported by a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Gledden Mobility Grant.

This lecture is part of the Perth Biodesign Innovation Summit - A DECADE OF IMPACT.

Speaker: Professor Monika A. Kusiak, Department of Polar and Marine Research, Institute of Geophysics Polish Academy of Sciences.

Wednesday 27 May 2026, 6pm-7pm, Woolnough Lecture Theatre, UWA (Geology)

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Prior to the breakup of Gondwana, there was a triple junction between Western Australia, East Antarctica and the Indian Peninsula. At this geological ‘crossroads’, lies the Bunger Hills, the largest single area of rock not covered by ice in the East Antarctica. The separation of India and Australia from Antarctica marked the final breakup of Gondwana. As such, the continental margins of these three blocks can provide a wealth of evidence on the demise of a supercontinent.

During her talk, Prof. Kusiak will present preliminary results of the project determining the relationships between the Bunger Hills and continental blocks in Australia and India that were adjacent in the Gondwana (500 million years ago) and Rodinia (one billion years ago) supercontinents. She will show as well some work on the re-establishing the Polish Antarctic Station A.B. Dobrowolski, on which the operation was suspended in 1979. In the 2021/22 Antarctic season, four Polish scientists reactivated the base after 42 years. The ‘Mission impossible’ of working in the harsh conditions, to prepare the station and surrounding area for the future research stays was fulfilled.

Monika A. Kusiak is a professor at the Department of Polar and Marine Research at the Institute of Geophysics Polish Academy of Sciences and head of the ‘Geoprocessing Belsk Laboratory, GeoBeLa.’ Her research focuses on the application of isotope geochemistry, mainly U-Th-Pb and Lu-Hf, to understand the evolution of the Earth's oldest rocks, which are mostly found in present-day polar regions. Her particular interests lie in the accessory minerals (zircon, monazite, xenotime) to understand the behaviour of elements at the nano- as well as the micro-scale. She has participated in 13 polar expeditions: to Antarctica, Greenland, Labrador, and Svalbard. As a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Foundation for Polish Science, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and UWA Robert & Maude Gledden Visiting Fellow, she has conducted research in Japan, Australia, Sweden and Germany. As a receiver of the Fulbright Senior Award, she started her adventure at NASA to work on Martian and lunar samples. She is a secretary of the European Association of Geochemistry, a member of the Geoscience Group in the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) and listed among 100 Woman in Polar Sciences. For recognition of her science, she received the Bronze Cross of Merit.

Professor Kusiak is a UWA Gledden Visiting Fellow, working with Prof Anthony Kemp in the UWA School of Earth and Oceans

Presenter: Dr Mubarak Shah, Director, Center for Research in Computer Vision,  University of Central Florida (UCF)

19 May 2026, 10am-12 Noon, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies

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Agentic systems address the limitations of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents that iteratively reason, use tools, and share intermediate results. While LMMs show promise in medical diagnosis—combining textual and visual inputs—they are often too general for the diversity of real-world clinical scenarios. In practice, diagnosis involves multiple specialists contributing domain-specific expertise. To emulate this, I present MedRoute, a dynamic multi-agent framework where specialist LMM agents collaborate under a General Practitioner equipped with a reinforcement learning-based router for adaptive specialist selection, and a Moderator that synthesizes the final decision.

To improve robustness, recent approaches run multiple agent teams in parallel to explore diverse reasoning paths. However, this leads to substantial computational overhead. To address this, I introduce Learning to Share (LTS), a shared-memory mechanism that enables selective reuse of intermediate results across teams. LTS employs a global memory bank and a lightweight controller that determines which intermediate steps should be stored, reducing redundancy while maintaining efficiency.

Finally, evaluating agentic systems remains challenging, as existing benchmarks largely focus on text-based tasks and lack support for multimodal reasoning. To address this, I present Agent-X, a large-scale benchmark for vision-centric agents. Agent-X emphasizes multimodal reasoning and vision-first evaluation, rigorously testing agents’ ability to process complex visual and textual inputs, execute tool-augmented plans, and perform deep reasoning across realistic scenarios.

Dr. Mubarak Shah is the Trustee Chair Professor and founding Director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, NAI, IAPR, AAIA, and SPIE. His research spans generative AI and computer vision including topics such as agentic systems, large language and multimodal models, human activity recognition, visual tracking, geo-localization, crowd analysis, and object detection.