Svetha Venkatesh is an ARC Australian Laureate Fellow, Alfred Deakin Professor and Co-Director of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A2I2) at Deakin University. She was elected a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2004 for contributions to formulation and extraction of semantics in multimedia data, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 2006, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2021 for ground-breaking research and contributions that have had clear impact.

In 2017, Professor Venkatesh was appointed an Australian Laureate Fellow, the highest individual award the Australian Research Council can bestow.