[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ custom_padding_last_edited=”on|tablet” admin_label=”Hero” _builder_version=”4.6.0″ use_background_color_gradient=”on” background_color_gradient_start=”#001b56″ background_color_gradient_end=”rgba(92,126,188,0.81)” background_color_gradient_direction=”50deg” background_color_gradient_start_position=”25%” background_color_gradient_overlays_image=”on” background_image=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Michael-Witbrock-web.jpg” width=”90%” custom_margin=”||||false|false” custom_margin_last_edited=”off|tablet” custom_padding=”6vw||0vw|10vw|false|false” custom_padding_tablet=”|10vw||10vw|false|true” custom_padding_phone=”” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row column_structure=”3_5,2_5″ _builder_version=”4.4.8″ width=”100%” custom_padding=”27px|||||” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”4.4.7″ global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.0″ text_font=”Exo 2|||on|||||” text_text_color=”#fdba5f” text_letter_spacing=”1px” global_colors_info=”{}”]members [/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.8″ header_font=”Bungee Hairline|600|||||||” header_font_size=”72px” background_layout=”dark” header_font_size_tablet=”48px” header_font_size_phone=”28px” header_font_size_last_edited=”on|desktop” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Our people

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.8″ text_font=”PT Sans||||||||” text_font_size=”18px” background_layout=”dark” text_font_size_tablet=”15px” text_font_size_phone=”14px” text_font_size_last_edited=”on|phone” global_colors_info=”{}”]Our research group consists of honours, postgraduate, and doctoral students, and professional researchers from the University of Auckland along with other remote research collaborators.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”2_5″ _builder_version=”4.4.8″ custom_padding=”60px||||false|false” custom_padding_tablet=”0px||||false|false” custom_padding_phone=”” custom_padding_last_edited=”on|tablet” border_radii=”on|5px|5px|5px|5px” global_colors_info=”{}”][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.4.8″ module_alignment=”right” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.4.8″ global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_image src=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/robotics-05-1-1.png” title_text=”robotics-05″ align=”right” _builder_version=”4.4.8″ custom_margin_tablet=”|-10vw|||false|false” custom_margin_phone=”” custom_margin_last_edited=”on|tablet” global_colors_info=”{}”][/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.4.8″ custom_padding=”0px||||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Michael Witbrock” position=”Professor” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/biggest.jpg” linkedin_url=”https://nz.linkedin.com/in/witbrock” icon_color=”#000000″ _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” background_color=”#ffffff” animation_style=”slide” link_option_url=”http://www.science.auckland.ac.nz/people/profile/m-witbrock” border_style_all=”none” border_color_all_image=”#000000″ border_style_all_image=”dashed” global_colors_info=”{}”]Professor Michael Witbrock is leading the research group, the Strong AI Lab, at the intersection of machine learning, reasoning and natural language understanding, with an additional focus on achieving the best social and civilisational impacts of increasingly powerful AI.
[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Izak Tait” position=”Operations Manager” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Izak-e1623983237789.png” linkedin_url=”https://nz.linkedin.com/in/izak-tait” _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” link_option_url=”https://nz.linkedin.com/in/izak-tait” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Izak is the Operations Manager for the Lab, making sure everything runs smoothly and efficiently. If there is every anything that anyone needs, Izak is the one to turn to. Izak’s background is in research management, having coordinated and managed the School of Computer Science’s research before moving to the Strong AI Lab.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Diana Benavides Prado” position=”Senior Research Fellow” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/dbp-e1648164037117.jpg” _builder_version=”4.10.5″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” linkedin_url=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-benavides-prado” sticky_enabled=”0″]

Diana is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Strong AI Lab, School of Computer Science, The University of Auckland. Her research focuses in the areas of lifelong/continual learning and human-centred AI. She is also recently interested in language models and multimodal machine learning. She has extensive experience leading the design and deployment of machine learning tools for supporting decision making in a variety of application domains. She also has mentoring and teaching experience in data science, machine learning, computer algorithms and programming languages. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Joshhua is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science of the University of Auckland. He is currently working in artificial intelligence after completing a PhD in psychology, where he compared the strengthening and signalling properties of positive reinforcers. His research interests include incorporating concepts from psychology into deep learning and applying machine learning techniques to psychological data. He has recently published papers on incorporating the properties of phenomenology into deep neural networks. His current research is looking at expanding the long-term memory capabilities of sequential networks such as transformers.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Yang Chen” position=”Research Fellow” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/yangchen-e1623983446150.jpg” icon_color=”#000000″ admin_label=”Person” _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” background_color=”#ffffff” animation_style=”slide” link_option_url=”https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/people/profile/yang-chen” border_style_all=”none” border_color_all_image=”#000000″ border_style_all_image=”dashed” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Yang worked in the area of (inverse) reinforcement learning and computational game theory during his PhD study in the University of Auckland. He received his First Class Honours degree in computer science from the University of Auckland in 2018. He obtained his B.S. in computer science from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2017. During his PhD, he was a research intern at DAMO Academy (Alibaba) in 2020. He also got the Google Global PhD Fellowship Nomination in 2020. Currently his research focus is on applying reinforcement learning to automatic reasoning and proving.

Lia’s background is largely in statistics, data science and applied mathematics. For her MSc (in Statistics), she studied stochastic optimal control theory and she proceeded into doing a PhD in applied mathematics where the focus of her research was in Bayesian statistical inverse problems with applications to Electrical Impedance Tomography imaging problem. Her researches in PhD naturally led her to machine learning and AI. Currently she has great interests in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in particular with text generation, word embedding methods and language translations. She is endlessly fascinated by the studies made in the field of AI and in particular with NLP.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Alex Peng” position=”Research Fellow” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/alex_peng-e1623968398286.jpg” _builder_version=”4.9.6″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” link_option_url=”https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/people/profile/ypen260″ global_colors_info=”{}”]

Alex was a commerce graduate who found his passion in artificial intelligence, especially in machine learning. His PhD thesis is on improving the generalisation of neural networks when labelled data is limited by utilising unlabelled data. Currently, his research focuses on NLP tasks and automated reasoning with neural networks. His other personal research interests include trying to understand the generalisation of neural networks, causal inference from data and symbolic regression.

Vithya is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science of the University of Auckland. Her PhD was on domain-specific language models for multi-label classification of medical text. Vithya holds two Masters degrees, both with first class Honours: one from the University of Auckland specialising in Applied Mathematics and the other from the University of Waikato specialising in Machine learning. She has worked for more than a decade in both academia and the health sector in New Zealand before returning to complete her PhD. She is motivated by the advancements of technology, and what AI can do to improve lives.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Qiming (Bill) Bao” position=”PhD Student” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Qiming-Bao.jpg” linkedin_url=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/qiming-bill-bao-773757166/” icon_color=”#000000″ _builder_version=”4.10.5″ _module_preset=”default” background_color=”#ffffff” animation_style=”slide” link_option_url=”https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/profile/qbao775″ border_style_all=”none” border_color_all_image=”#000000″ border_style_all_image=”dashed” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Qiming (Bill) Bao is a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His supervisors are Professor Michael Witbrock and Dr Jiamou Liu. His research interests include soft reasoning related to deep learning.

I am pursuing a PhD from the School of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. My research interests include Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. My current research focuses on multi-step reasoning for complex question answering. Supervisors: Michael Witbrock and Pat Riddle

Stefan Fuchs is a PhD student at the University of Auckland, School of Computer Science. His research focuses on applying Natural Language Processing to automate the compliance checking process in the building industry. This application involves specialised domain terminology and knowledge, the structured and interlinked characteristics of legal texts, and the scarcity of labelled training data. His interest in generalisable machine learning models and learning from few examples can help to solve this domain application.

After graduating from the University of Auckland with a B.A in Computer Science and Philosophy in the 1980s, Tim spent over 30 years in industry before returning in 2020 to complete a BSc Honours degree. He is currently engaged in research on the topic of training NLP models to generalise to answering questions they have not encountered before.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Aaron Keesing” position=”PhD Student” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/aaronkeesing-e1623981913142.jpg” linkedin_url=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-keesing-10a594171/” _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Aaron studied computer science and mathematics at undergraduate level before completing his BSc(Hons) dissertation on anomaly detection in wireless sensor networks. He then started his PhD research, currently supervised by Yun Sing Koh and Michael Witbrock. His research is focussed on improving the robustness of speech emotion recognition across diverse accents and languages. Aaron’s other interests more generally include affective computing, speech technology, artificial intelligence and mathematics.

I received my M.Sc. degree specialised in Communications and Signal Processing from Imperial College London in 2014, and my B.Eng. degree majoring in Electronic and Information Engineering from Dalian University of Technology in 2013. After that, I worked as a software engineer in Singapore for more than four years. I am now researching the field of Natural Language Processing, mainly on natural language understanding and generation.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Neset Tan” position=”PhD Student” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/neset-e1624241069226.jpg” linkedin_url=”https://nz.linkedin.com/in/nashat-tan” _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Before jumping into the Machine Learning research area, Neset involved research and teaching in Mathematics for a long period of time. He has worked a variety of academic and non-academic jobs such as a research assistant, post-doc researcher, lecturer, software engineer, founder, and director of an engineering consultant company. His current interest is positioned at the intersection of natural language progressing and automation of data science. He has been researching various approaches such as deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques to obtain efficient ML systems for the mentioned areas. He has several publications in functional analysis, measure theory, optimization theory, and numerical analysis.

Yonghua Zhu is a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, the University of Auckland, supervised by Michael Witbrock and Bakhadyr Khoussainov. Currently, his research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in particular with reading comprehension of scientific papers.

Coming from the multi-disciplines background of science and art, Ming-Bin’s primary research interests are in the intersection of computer science and linguistics, particularly AI in journalism. He is currently a research master student at the School of Computer Science of the University of Auckland, supervised by Professor Michael Witbrock. His current research project is developing an open domain interviewing agent, a dialogue bot capable of asking interviewing questions given a topic.

I completed my BSc majoring in computer science and statistics at the University of Auckland in 2019. From which I completed my honours year in computer science the following year supervised by Michael Witbrock. My projects’ topic was open domain question answering, with a focus on reading strategies in machines. This leads to my current research as a research master student supervised by Joshua Bensemann. It involves extending my honours work by improving the implementation of reading strategies in machines and measuring its performance in the question answering field as a whole.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Ziqi Wang” position=”Research Master Student” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ziqi.jpg” linkedin_url=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/ziqi-zachary-wang/” _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” global_colors_info=”{}”]

Ziqi graduated from the University of Waikato with a BSc in Computer Science and spent his final year of bachelor study at the University of California, Irvine. Carrying more than five years of full-stack industrial experience, he started to explore his growth zone in academia. His current research focuses on adapting question answering (QA) systems trained in resource-rich languages to low-resource languages.

[/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member name=”Nathan Young” position=”Honours Student” image_url=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/male-avatar.jpg” _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” global_colors_info=”{}”][/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_2,1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_team_member _builder_version=”4.8.2″ _module_preset=”default” animation_style=”slide” global_colors_info=”{}”][/et_pb_team_member][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Footer” _builder_version=”4.4.8″ use_background_color_gradient=”on” background_color_gradient_start=”rgba(0,0,0,0.1)” background_color_gradient_end=”rgba(0,0,0,0)” background_color_gradient_direction=”190deg” background_color_gradient_end_position=”21%” background_color_gradient_overlays_image=”on” background_image=”https://strong-ai.naoinstitute.cloud.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/robotics-04-3.jpg” custom_padding=”8vw||8vw||true|false” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row column_structure=”3_5,2_5″ custom_padding_last_edited=”on|phone” _builder_version=”4.4.8″ custom_padding=”||||false|false” custom_padding_tablet=”|24%|||false|false” custom_padding_phone=”|10%|||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”4.4.8″ global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.8″ text_font=”Exo 2|||on|||||” text_text_color=”#0e4de3″ text_letter_spacing=”1px” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”]Get Started
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It’s Never Too Late or Too Early to Get Started

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The Strong AI Lab has immediate opportunities for Ph.D. Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, and Senior Research Programmers. You are welcome to contact us.

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Members

Our people

It’s Never Too Late or Too Early to Get Started