Dr Qinghua Lu

Dr Qinghua Lu is a principal research scientist at CSIRO's Data61. She is the team leader of the Software Engineering for AI Research Team and Responsible AI Science Team.

She was the winner of the 2023 Asia-Pacific Women in AI Trailblazer Award. Dr. Lu contributes to several key AI initiatives, including Australia’s AI Safety Standard, Frontier Model Forum, OECD.AI’s trustworthy AI metrics, International Working Group on AI Metrology, and EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice.

Dr. Lu has published over 150 papers in premier international journals/conferences. She is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on AI and Engineering Applications of AI. She serves as Area Chair of Software Engineering for AI at ICSE’26, and the Program Chair for AIware’25 and CAIN’25. She is also the program committee member or reviewers of top-tier AI and software engineering conferences, including IJCAI, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICSE, FSE, ICSA, etc.

Her recent paper titled “Towards a Roadmap on Software Engineering for Responsible AI” won the ACM Distinguished Paper Award. Dr. Lu’s book, “Responsible AI: Best Practices for Creating Trustworthy AI Systems”, published by Pearson Addison-Wesley in December 2023, is the world’s first responsible AI book for practitioners and became Amazon’s No. 3 AI book bestseller. Her new book, “Engineering AI Systems: Architecture and DevOps Essentials” was published by Pearson Addison-Wesley in March 2025.

Her team's recent research mainly focuses on AI Agent Engineering and AI Safety/Responsible AI.

AI Agent Engineering:

• Agent Architecture Design (cited by scientific report on advanced AI safety for AI Safety Summit)
• Agent Design Pattern Catalogue
• Agent Architecture Evaluation
• AgentOps
• No/Low Code Agent Engineering
• AI/Agent Evaluation & Evaluation-Driven Learning
• Agent Workflow Compliance Checking
• Agent Workflow Exception Handling
• API Agent & UI Agent
• UI Intelligence
• Data Intelligence

AI Safety/Responsible AI:

• Swiss Cheese Model for AI Safety: Multi-layered Runtime Guardrails for Agents
• Responsible AI Pattern Catalogue (highlighted in DTA's National Framework for the Assurance of AI in Government)
• Responsible AI Question Bank
• Responsible AI Metric Catalogue
• ESG-AI Assessment (widely reported internationally)
• AI/Data/Vulnerability Bill of Materials (BOM)
• AI/Software Supply Chain Guard
• UI Guard for Dark Pattern Detection

Books

Her new book "AI Engineering: Architecture and DevOps for AI Systems" was published by Pearson Addison Wesley in March 2025.

Her book “Responsible AI: Best Practices for Creating Trustworthy AI Systems” was published by Pearson Addison-Wesley in Dec 2023. This book is the world’s first responsible AI book for practitioners, which peaked at No.3 on Amazon’s AI book bestseller list.

Papers

She has published 150+ papers in premier international journals and conferences.

Recent Publications: Google Scholar profile

Community Services

She is part of the International Working Group on AI Metrology (established by Frontier Model Forum and Human Intelligence) and OECD.AI’s trustworthy AI metrics project team. She also serves a member of Australian’s National AI Centre Responsible AI think tank.

Here is the list of professional services in the recent 5 years.
* Area Chair of Software Engineering for AI, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'26)
* Organisation Chair, Annual International Workshop on Responsible AI Engineering
* Program Chair, AIware'25
* Program Chair, 4th International Conference on AI Engineering (CAIN'25)
* Local Chair, WWW'25
* PC member or reviewers: ICSE, FSE, ICSA, CAIN, AIware, AAAI, IJCAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CAI, BPM, SAML, ECSA, etc.
* Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
* Associate Editor: IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials
* Editorial Board Member: Empirical Software Engineering Journal
* Associate Editor: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
* Associate Editor: Elsevier Blockchain Research and Applications

Awards

She is the winner of the 2023 APAC Women in AI Trailblazer Award. She received IEEE Hyper-Intelligence Technical Committee (HITC) Mid Career Award in 2023. Her recent paper titled “Towards a Roadmap on Software Engineering for Responsible AI”, which has set the future direction of the field, is widely cited by the community and won the ACM Distinguished Paper Award.