People

Bob Williamson Research Group Leader, Professor ANU Bob's research goal is to reconceive the field of machine learning. The research agenda is to develop a composable basis for machine learning to focus on problems rather than solutions.
James Bailey Associate Professor, University of Melbourne James works in data mining and machine learning with applications in Computational Health Informatics and Bioinformatics.
Tim Baldwin Associate Professor, University of Melbourne Tim works in natural language processing and computational linguistics with applications in biomedical text mining.
Peter Bartlett Professor, Queensland University of Technology & University of California at Berkeley Peter's research interests include machine learning, statistical learning theory, and adaptive control.
Edwin Bonilla Senior Researcher, CRL Edwin's research focuses on probabilistic models to build systems that can learn from their past experience and for the analysis of complex, structured data. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, computer science and artificial intelligence.
Wray Buntine Principal Researcher, CRL Wray's interests are theoretical and applied research in machine learning, probabilistic methods, and information access, for instance document analysis and document retrieval. A common thread for current research is non-parametric Bayesian methods for topic modelling.
Tiberio Caetano Principal Researcher, ATP Tiberio is interested in big data. More specifically, he is working on developing learning algorithms that can efficiently infer robust patterns from messy, large, unstructured, noisy, diverse and ever-growing data repositories.
Lawrence Cavedon Senior Researcher, VRL Lawrence's current research at NICTA is focused on text mining for biomedical applications, mainly in collaboration with biomedical and health organisations.
Fang Chen Research Leader, ATP Dr. Chen's main research interests are behaviour analytics, especially in human machine interaction, cognitive load modelling, speech processing, pattern recognition, human and system performance prediction and evaluation.
Justin Domke Senior Researcher, CRL Justin is interested in efficient methods for learning and inference in probabilistic graphical models, sometimes with applications in computer vision
Julien Epps Senior Lecturer, UNSW Julien's research interests include speech modeling and front-end processing, automatic cognitive load measurement, genomic signal processing and applications of digital signal processing and pattern recognition.
Gabriela Ferraro Researcher, CRL Interests: Computational linguistics and Natural language processing, especially collocations, with applications to patent texts.
Stephen Gould Researcher, CRL Steve has broad interests in computer and robotic vision, machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, and discrete and continuous optimization. His main research is in the application of machine learning techniques (specifically, conditional Markov random fields) to geometric and semantic scene understanding.
M Asif Khawaja, Researcher, ATP Asif's research interests focus on behavioural analysis. This includes cognitive load measurement, trust measurement, and linguistic analysis. He is also interested in theoretical and applied research in building adaptive Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems.
Chris Leckie Associate Professor, University of Melbourne Chris's research interests are in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and telecommunications. He has made theoretical and practical contributions in areas such as machine learning, fault diagnosis, distributed systems and design automation.
Wei Liu, Researcher, ATP Wei works in machine learning and data mining. His research interests include tensor factorization, dynamic graph modelling, game theory, and causal inference.
Khoa Nguyen Researcher, ATP Khoa works in machine learning and data mining with focuses on unsupervised anomaly detection, clustering, spectral/graph-based methods, and matrix/tensor factorisation.
Simon O'Callaghan Researcher, ATP Simon’s primary research focus is on non-parametric Bayesian inference methods with applications to computational sustainability and autonomous mobile robotics.
Fabio Ramos Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Fabio's research interests include Bayesian statistics, stochastic processes for spatial modelling, probabilistic networks, and multi-sensor perception.
Alistair Reid, Researcher, CRL Alistair's current research at NICTA is focused on Bayesian statistics and stochastic models of spatial data. He is currently applying his research to geophysical inversion problems, and also maintains an interest in autonomous robotics.
Mark Reid Researcher, CRL Mark has a wide range of interests in symbolic and statistical machine learning, ranging from the theoretical to algorithm implementation and methodologies for their evaluation.
Paul Rivera Software Engineer, CRL Paul is an experienced JEE web applications developer and works on the web version of OpinionWatch - a visual document explorer project of NICTA.
Scott Sanner Senior Researcher, CRL Scott's research focuses on a broad range of topics under the umbrella of intelligent decision-making in AI spanning sequential decision theory, machine learning, symbolic representations and reasoning, and information retrieval.
Hanna Suominen Senior Researcher, CRL Hanna is an experienced researcher, coordinator and teacher on health and wellness technologies. She works as a machine learning researcher in the business team of health at NICTA.
Ronnie Taib Senior Research Engineer/Scientist, ATP Ronnie has a broad interest in all the technologies enabling more friendly and useful machines and programs, encompassing multi-agent systems, context and user-aware systems, multimodal user interaction, and machine learning.
Yang Wang Senior Researcher, ATP Yang’s research interests include machine learning and information fusion techniques, especially weakly-supervised learning, spatiotemporal modelling, and their applications to intelligent infrastructure, cognitive and emotive computing, and image and video analysis.
Christfried Webers Senior Research Engineer, CRL Chris works on the project Smart Mobile Content Distribution and teaches Statistical Machine Learning at The ANU.
Lexing Xie Senior Lecturer, ANU My research focus broadly on innovative use and design of machine learning algorithms and systems, especially on spatial, temporal and multi-relational graph data.
Xinhua Zhang, Researcher, CRL Xinhua’s research interests are in nonparametric methods for machine learning. This includes kernel methods, graphical models, sparse learning, and large scale optimization.
Jianlong Zhou, Researcher, ATP Jianlong Zhou's research interests include interactive machine learning, human computer interaction (HCI), spatial augmented reality, visualization, image analysis and bioimage informatics.

Students

The Australian National University:

Ehsan Abbasnejad

Research interests: Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Graphical Models, Approximate Inference, Non-parametric Bayesian Methods, Recommender Systems, and Decision Theory.

Research interest: Machine Learning, Dependent Normalized Random Measures, Dependent Poisson-Kingman Processes, Some topics on Diffusion Processes, MCMC for Hierarchical Poisson-Dirichlet Processes, Topic Models, Manifold Learning and Gait Recognition (master research topics).

Nick Engerer

Nick's research work is focused on creating short term power output forecasts for groups (10s to 1000s) of rooftop solar photovoltaic systems.

Project Title: Short term power forecasts for distributed photovoltaic arrays through machine learning

Nick is using power output data from photovoltaic arrays to create city-wide estimates of the power produced by rooftop-scale solar energy systems. Using his expertise in meteorology and solar radiation, he is working with the NICTA Distributed Solar Prediction research group to develop solar forecast algorithms for Australian cities.

Kar Wai Lim

Kar Wai is currently doing his research under the supervision of Dr. Wray Buntine (NICTA), primarily focusing on statistical machine learning in topic modelling.

Project Title:Non-parametric Bayesian approach on topic modelling and its applications

Kar Wai is developing a better topic model for analysing tweets, with the aim of opinion mining of general public.

Van Trung Nguyen

Research Interests: Statistical and large scale machine learning, approximate inference, Gaussian processes, topic models, sentiment analysis, data analysis.

Project Title: Gaussian process models for large-scale regression

Van Trung working on mixtures and products of sparse Gaussian processes for regression problems with very large datasets.

Giorgio Patrini

Research interest: how big data affects methods and practice of machine learning. In particular, Giorgio is working on weakly supervised learning and interpretability of high dimensional feature spaces.

Mindika Premachandra

mindika.premachandra@nicta.com.au

Avraham Ruderman

avraham.ruderman@nicta.com.au

Zahra Zamani

Research interests: Artificial Intelligence, Agent frameworks, Logic, Learning (AI context as well as the original definition!)

The University of New South Wales and University of Sydney:

Syed Arshad

Research interests: Machine Learning, Bayesian data analysis, Big Data analytics, Computational Intelligence

Siyuan Chen

Research interests:primarily on human-centred computing, pattern recognition, intelligent user interface and multimodal information fusion.

Project Title: Real-time cognitive load measurement via eye activity

The aim of this project is to use low-cost IR webcams to capture user eye activity, extract useful eye features that are correlated to cognition and then use supervised machine learning techniques to classify whether a user is under low, medium or high cognitive load level during tasks.

Victor Chu

Research interests: smart predictions and modeling by the application of machine learning and data mining techniques.

Project Title: Time-varying Dynamic Bayesian Causal Networks for Moving Objects

To learn the periodic behaviors of moving objects, e.g., traffic, and to infer their correlations are essential knowledge related to our daily life. The popularity of spatial-temporal-aware equipments allow the collection of trajectories in unprecedented scale. Depending on the type of moving objects, their trajectories might exhibit unfavorable statistical properties, e.g., data sparseness and skewness, and heterogeneous data patterns, etc. To address the problems, we aim to reveal the moving objects' view of areas by learning regions directly from their trajectories based on unsupervised machine learning techniques, and to capture the evolution of region structure by using a time-varying model. Upon satisfying causal Markov assumption, causal inference can be made.

Nicholas Cummins

Research interests: main area of research is the automatic classification of depressed voices using supervised machine learning techniques.

Project Title: Depression in speech - effects and classification

Nick's research involves using speech processing and machine learning techniques to assess whether the voice can be used an objective marker for the diagnosis of clinical depression.

Melissa Duell

Research interests:Network systems models, Traffic modelling methodologies, Sustainability models integrating the transport and electricity systems.

Ewald Enzinger

Research interests: Forensic voice comparison, speaker recognition, speech processing

Project Title: Forensic voice comparison

Ewald's research focuses on the application of speech processing and statistical modeling in the implementation of forensic voice comparison in the new paradigm for the evaluation of forensic evidence, using the likelihood-ratio framework, quantitative measurements, statistical models, and testing the degree of validity and reliability under specific casework conditions.

Mojgan Ghanavati

Research interests: Data mining and knowledge discovery, Customer Relationship Management, Electronic marketing, Electronic business models, Market Segmentation, Text retrieval, Knowledge Management. Semantic web, Recommender Systems.

Chee Cheun Huang

Research interests: Speech processing, Automatic phonetic segmentation and statistical modeling with applications in forensic voice comparison and automatic speaker recognition.

Ahmad Alhossin Khawaji

Research interests: Evaluating trust using human and system behavior. Trust in social media and computer-mediated communication (CMC).

Project Title: Trust in social media and computer-mediated communication (CMC)

Ahmad is finding methods to assess the trust and study the factors that may affect the trust in these mediums.

Zelin Li

Research interests: computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, specifically on sparse coding, dictionary learning and object detection with application on thermal images.

Xianghang Liu

Research interests: Probabilistic graphical models, Statistical inference, Optimization

Yi Wang

Research topics: Unbounded Dictionary Learning, Visual Representation, Dependence Modelling, Data Association.

Project Title: Spatial/Temporal Dependent Visual Data Representation and Dimensionality Reduction

Spatial/temporal visual data is always over-redundant and highly-dependent. Yi's research is to discover the latent structure/patterns and dependence from the visual data.

Kun Yu

Research interests: Pen interaction & computing technologies; Cognitive load measurement and evaluation; Pattern recognition and statistic learning methods; Mobile social networking applications and services; and User interface design.

Pega Zarjam

Research interests: Biomedical/Physiological Signal Processing and Analysis, Time-Scale/Time-Frequency Signal Processing and Analysis, Data Communications, Mobile Communications.

Project Title: Cognitive workload measurement using EEG signal processing

In this research, Pega is investigating the suitability of different classes of features for discriminating between varying fine levels of induced working memory load, to find the optimal frequency bands, channels and features for an EEG-based workload classification system, which could bring us a step closer to the use of such precise and automatic measurement technologies in BCI/HCI researches.

Queensland University of Technology and University of Queensland:

Johnson Fong

Research interests: Ubiquitous Computing (improving the intelligibility and user control of context-aware applications, Modelling and reasoning of context information) and Network Security.

University of Melbourne:

Bo Han

Research interest: Natural Language Processing, Social Media.

Project Title: Improve the utility of social media data (under BioTALA)

Social media data is noisy and massive. Bo's research objective is to clean the text and to concentrate on spatial-aware data, so that existing text mining algorithms can be more effective and efficient.

Jey Han Lau

Research Interests: Topic Models, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Multiword Expressions, Terminology Extraction Social Media Text Analysis, Distributional Semantics.

Project Title: Topic Modelling

Most of Jey's research focuses on building NLP applications and evaluations of topic models.

Marco Lui

Research interests: Language Identification, Text Categorization, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Web-Scale Data, Online Forum Data.

Goce Ristanoski

Mahsa Salehi

Research interests: anomaly detection, data stream mining, ensemble clustering, pattern recognition, data mining with application in Parkinson's Disease patients.

Li Wang

Research interests: knowledge discovery and content extraction from social media data, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval technologies.

Lei Zhang

Jiazhen He

Research interests: Data mining and Machine Learning, especially mining information networks.