Ben Farmer Email & Phone Number

I have been working at Acacia Systems since late 2023, in a hybrid Research Scientist / Software Engineering role. My primary area of research has been passive sonar track-to-track fusion. Acacia Systems has long been a provider of tracking software for the Australian Defence Force and other government agencies, but has more recently begun developing automatic fusion algorithms aimed at providing fused track solutions for fleets of autonomous/unmanned ocean surface vehicles. My R&D activities for the company have been centred on reviewing the state-of-the-art in the academic literature on track-to-track fusion, making algorithmic recommendations, developing working prototypes in the R&D software stack, transitioning prototypes into the production codebase, planning for future improvements, assessing algorithm performance, and identifying issues requiring research attention.Prior to that I worked as a data scientist and scientific software developer at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, in the Water Models Team in the Research to Operations group. I worked mainly on the "eReefs" project, a multi-agency project whose goal is to monitor the health of the Great Barrier Reef and provide vital information to drive decision making related to management of the reef. Our team provided hydrological modelling of the Queensland coastal catchment areas from which water and pollutants ultimately flow into the reef ocean areas. I was mainly involved in designing and developing an operational version of this modelling, plus assorted data analysis and statistical modelling. I worked closely with the hydrologists in the team on the planning and delivery of projects.Prior to transitioning to industry I was a theoretical physicist, and followed a fairly traditional academic route PhD to postdoc to research fellow. I obtained my PhD in theoretical high-energy physics from Monash University in 2014, and spent my postdoctoral career mostly in Europe; first as a postdoc in the dark matter group at Stockholm University, and then as a research fellow in the astrophysics group at Imperial College London. My research was heavily computationally driven, and also heavy on statistics and statistical theory (I was looking for evidence of new fundamental particles to explain phenomena such as dark matter, by statistically combining results from many different experiments) so I learned a lot from it about software development, statistics, high-performance computing, machine learning, hypothesis testing, etc.

Listed skills include Science, Research, Latex, Scientific Computing, and 20 others.