Welcome
I am a Senior Research Fellow in the AI and Autonomy Lab of the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia (2012-present). I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Melbourne in 2011. I have rather diverse research interests that include election integrity (with a focus on post-election audits), combinatorial optimization (with a focus on algorithms for solving large problems through decomposition, local search, and the use of mathematical programming), applications of reinforcement learning, and Explainable AI. For more detail on my work in some of these areas, head over to the Research tab!
On the socials I’m @michelleblom8 on Twitter and @michelleblom@aus.social on Mastodon.
PhD Opportunities
I am currently accepting new PhD students. If you are interested in my any facets of my work, and feel that you meet the requirements for entry into the PhD program with the Faculty of Engineering and IT (see here for details on eligibility), please feel free to reach out to me. I am particularly interested in students that wish to work on post-election auditing (see the About and Research tabs for more details!).
News
August, 2025Work on [Large Neighbourhood Search for Long Term Open-Pit Mine Planning](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/inte.2024.0152) has been published in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.
July, 2025A summary of our work on risk-limiting audits for IRV elections using RAIRE has been published in the latest issue of [IEEE Uplink](https://r10.ieee.org/victorian/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2025/07/IEEE_Victorial_Section_UPLINK_2025Vol.1.pdf).
March, 2025Two of our papers were accepted at VOTING'25: [3+ Seat Risk-Limiting Audits for Single Transferable Vote Elections](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14803) and [Doing More With Less: Mismatch-Based Risk-Limiting Audits](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16104)