ACS congratulates IT professional Pranith Kyatham for winning the 2020 ACS President’s Award.
Pranith has been volunteering as an ACS Student Ambassador and recently graduated from La Trobe University with a Masters in networking and cyber security.
“Winning this award is a really exciting thing for me,” Pranith told Information Age.
“ACS helped me a lot when I was studying my masters. I attended a lot of networking events and was able to meet with some great people in cyber security like Matt Warren.
“The encouragement I got from everyone while studying meant a lot to me.”
ACS President Ian Oppermann applauded Pranith and looks forward to seeing his ICT career unfold.
"My heartfelt congratulations to Pranith, a very deserving winner," he said.
"I am sure that, with his recently confirmed qualifications, Pranith will continue to be a valuable contributor to ACS."
Pranith is currently undertaking an internship as a penetration tester where he is learning how to hack into networks and report on their weaknesses.
Later this year, Pranith will join a research project looking into adversarial deep learning.
“This is about preventing cyber attacks by using artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said.
Pranith became interested in cyber security and networking during his bachelor’s degree, and said he has since developed a passion for those areas of computer science.
“I’ve always loved technology,” Pranith said.
“So once I got really interested in cyber security, I found more podcasts and Discord groups to help me do more research and understand it better.”
While he is looking for full-time roles to put his qualifications to use in the market – and has interviewed with multi-national consulting firms – Pranith is also interested in carving his own path through the technology landscape.
“I am working on a startup idea,” he said.
“At this stage I’m not really sure what it is but I am really interested in the startup side of things as well – that would be my dream, and so I can work out what works best for me.”
