Dr Qinghua Lu

Dr Qinghua Lu is a principal research scientist and leads the Responsible AI science team at CSIRO's Data61, Australia. She was the winner of the 2023 Asia-Pacific Women in AI Trailblazer Award. Dr. Lu contributes to several key AI safety initiatives, including Australia’s AI Safety Standard, OECD.AI’s trustworthy AI metrics project, 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 of top-tier conferences, including 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 forthcoming book, “Engineering AI Systems: Architecture and DevOps Essentials” is set to be published by Pearson Addison-Wesley in March 2025.

Her team's recent research includes
- AI Safety Evaluation
- Agent Architecture Evaluation
- Evaluation-Driven Learning for Agents
- Swiss Cheese Model for AI Safety: Multi-layered Runtime Guardrails for Agents
- Agent Architecture Design (cited by scientific report on advanced AI safety for AI Safety Summit)
- Agentic Compliance Checking
- Agent Workflow Exception Handling
- AgentOps
- AI/Data/Vulnerability Bill of Materials (BOM)
- AI/Software Supply Chain Guard
- UI Guard for Dark Pattern Detection
- ESG-AI Assessment (widely reported internationally)
- Responsible AI Question Bank
- Responsible AI Metric Catalogue
- Responsible AI Pattern Catalogue (highlighted in the National Framework for the Assurance of AI in Government)

Here is a summary of her team's work: Safe and Responsible AI Engineering

Books

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.

Her forthcoming book "AI Engineering: Architecture and DevOps for AI Systems" is set to be published by Pearson Addison Wesley in Jan 2025.

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: AAAI, ICSE, FSE, ICSA, AIware, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CAI, BPM, SAML, ECSA, etc.
* Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
* Associate Editor: IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials
* 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.