AJCAI2023: Emerging Researcher Award and Best Student Paper

AAII researchers have been honored with two awards at the recent 36th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence hosted at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, on 29 November 2023. 

Zhen Fang has been named The Australasian AI Emerging Researcher for 2023. Dr Fang receives this prestigious award for his ground breaking research in transfer learning and machine learning theory. In particular, Dr Fang's work on out-of-distribution learning earned him the NeurIPS 2023 Outstanding Paper Award alongside his supervisor, Dist. Prof Jie Lu earlier this year. Dr Zhen Fang is a Lecturer with AAII's DeSI Lab and recipient of the Australian Laureate Post-Doctoral Fellowship, working with Dist. Prof Jie Lu's supervision to develop internationally competitive research on autonomous machine learning for decision-making in complex situations.

AAII PhD student Jianan Yang (supervised by A/Prof Guodong Long) received the Best Student Paper Award for “Concept-guided Interpretable Federated Learning”. The paper aims to develop a novel interpretable mechanism in a large-scale distributed machine learning system with privacy-preserving constraints. Specifically, the terminology in this paper enables visual conceptualisation which may be applied to explain the differences among many participants, such as smartphones, with personal characteristics in nature. This paper is the first publication towards his thesis work.

Read more: AJCAI 2023