Our Team

Academic Researchers and Industry Experts

Professor Michael Witbrock

Co-Director of NAOInstitute

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Professor Gill Dobbie

Co-Director of NAOInstitute

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Madeline Newman

Head of Industry Partnerships for NAOInstitute

Executive Director, AI Forum New Zealand

Associate Professor Patrice Delmas

Associate Director for Grants and Fundraising for NAOI and Associate Professor

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr Matthew Egbert

Associate Director for Events for NAOI and Senior Lecturer

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Professor Robert Amor

Professor and Associate Dean PBRF

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Professor Yun Sing Koh

Professor

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Professor Jim Warren

Professor

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Associate Professor Jason Brown

Associate Professor and Associate Dean Academic

School of Cultures, Languages & Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland

Associate Professor Jing Sun

Associate Professor

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Joerg Wicker

Senior Lecturer

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Jiamou Liu

Associate Professor

School of Computer Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Diana Benavides Prado

Lecturer

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Jingfeng Zhang

Lecturer

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Alex Peng

Research Fellow

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Yang Chen

Research Fellow

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Trung Ngyuen

Research Fellow

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Dr. Vithya Yogarajan

Research Fellow

School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

PhD students

Stefan Fuchs

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

Transformer-based Semantic Parsing of Building Regulations: Supporting Regulators in Drafting Machine-Interpretable Rules

Qiming Bao

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

Assessing and Enhancing Language Models for Complex and Robust Logical Reasoning over Natural Language

Yonghua Zhu

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

Inductive Reasoning over Multiple Texts for Reading Comprehension

Sam Wei

PhD Candidate | 2023 – 2026

Echoes of Authenticity: Exploring the Frontiers of Copyright Protection in Music AI with Watermark Technologies and Adversarial Machine Learning

Dr. Neşet Tan

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

Gaël Gendron

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2024

Robust reasoning in Deep Learning engines with Causal Graph modelling

Tim Hartill

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2024

Teaching Smaller Language Models To Generalise To Unseen Compositional Questions

Andrey Borro

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2025

Generating Optimal Path Subgoals through Supervised Learning

Minjung Kim

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2025

General-purpose time series modelling for interpretable and domain-agnostic time-series analysis

Nathan Young

PhD Candidate | 2022 – 2025

Explaining State-of-the-Art Models as Approximations of Unbounded Ideals

Kobe Knowles

PhD Candidate | 2022 – 2025

Integrating Insights from Human Cognition with Artificial Neural Networks to Improve Data Efficiency During Learning

Timothy Pistotti

PhD Candidate | 2022 – 2025

Leveraging Linguistic Knowledge for Low-resource Natural Language Processing

Alumni

Dr. Joshua Bensemann

Research Fellow

Josh’s research interests include incorporating concepts from psychology into deep learning and applying machine learning techniques to psychological data.

Dr. Aaron Keesing

PhD | 2019 – 2023

Classifying Emotions Across Variations in Speech Data

Dr. Qianqian Qi

PhD | 2019 – 2023

Incorporating Multiple Types of Information in Condition Text Generation

Dr. Zhenyun Deng

PhD | 2019 – 2023

Interpretable Multi-hop Question Answering

Ming-Bin (Bryan) Chen

MSc | 2020 – 2021

Open domain interviewing agent

Ziqi Wang

MSc | 2020 – 2021

TQALL: Text-based Question Answering for Low-resource Languages