Artificial intelligence, evolutionary computation and machine learning

Victoria University of Wellington is leading this exciting field of future-defining research.

Our researchers are internationally respected, many of them partnering with companies such as Google, Microsoft, Huawei and IBM, as well as with other universities, including the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.

Progressive applications

The work of Victoria University of Wellington researchers is transforming areas such as skin and breast cancer detection, earthquake modelling, precision agriculture and seafood production, image recognition, object detection, biomarker detection, satellite image processing, cloud computing, text mining and natural language processing.

They are led by Professor Mengjie Zhang, who in 2017 was named by the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference as the number one researcher in full paper publication during 2005–2017 and third in his field in terms of his active networking connections.

Professor Zhang specialises in genetic programming, evolutionary deep learning and evolutionary scheduling.

Thought leaders

Our researchers have received outstanding or best paper awards from all the major international conferences in evolutionary computation.

Among our leaders in these fields are:

Learning classifier systems

• Associate Professor Will Browne

Features selection and big dimensionality reduction

• Dr Bing Xue

Categorical analysis and big dimensionality reduction

• Associate Professor Ivy Liu

All evolutionary scheduling and combinatorial optimisation

• Dr Yi Mei
• Dr Aaron Chen
• Dr Hui Ma
• Dr Su Nguyen

All text mining and natural language processing

• Dr Wei Gao
• Dr Xiaoying Sharon Gao
• Associate Professor Peter Andreae

Statistical and probability-based machine learning

• Associate Professor Marcus Frean

Evolutionary deep learning

• Dr Yanan Sun

Evolutionary image analysis

• Dr Harith Al-Sahaf

Symbolic regression and mathematical modelling

• Qi Chen

Biomarker and peptide detection

• Dr Lifeng Peng

Global hub

The University has chaired all the major conferences in evolutionary computation and in 2019 will host the largest yet, the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

We have been awarded more than two-thirds of the Marsden grants related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) given over the past decade by the prestigious Marsden Fund, administered by the Royal Society Te Apārangi on behalf of the government.

We have also received a large amount of competitive funding from the Australian Research Council, the Natural Science Foundation of China and industry.

Our researchers are centred around the creative environment of the University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science and are further supported through our Evolutionary Computation Research Group and Artificial Intelligence Group.

It is an interdisciplinary field, incorporating researchers from computer science, software engineering, network engineering, electronic and computer system engineering, statistics, operations research, information management and biology.

We have academics and PhD students working on these ground-breaking technologies from all over the world, including New Zealand, Australia, the United States, China, Vietnam, Europe and the Middle East.

Artificial intelligence stories