Svetha Venkatesh is a leading Australian computer scientist who has made fundamental and influential contributions to the field of activity and event recognition in multimedia data. Venkatesh pioneered many theoretical and algorithmic foundations for detecting normal and anomalous activities and deriving meaning from digital video. This underpinning theory has significantly impacted applications, including in automated security and video search. In related work, her fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning have advanced risk prognosis algorithms for medical data. These contributions to theory and methods have been internationally recognised through widely cited publications, patents, and the establishment of an award-winning global security company.