Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speech 1

Speaker: Dr. Mohit Bansal (Parker Distinguished Professor, PECASE/ACL/AAAI Fellow, Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill)

Speaker Biography: Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of California at Berkeley. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal generative models, grounded and embodied semantics, reasoning and planning agents, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning. He is an ACL Fellow, an AAAI Fellow, and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Director's Fellowship, and outstanding paper awards at ACL, CVPR, EACL, COLING, CoNLL, and TMLR.

Keynote Speech 2

Speaker: Prof. Chunhua Shen (Chair Professor, Zhejiang University)

Speaker Biography: Chunhua Shen is a Chair Professor at Zhejiang University, a position he has held since 2022. Prior to relocating to China, he was a Full Professor at the University of Adelaide, Australia, with a career encompassing academic and industry appointments including Amazon Australia, National ICT Australia (NICTA), and the Australian National University. He was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship in 2012. His current research focuses on the development of foundation models designed for reliable deployment in diverse, real-world open-set scenarios, spanning generative AI models for content creation, perception systems for autonomous robotics, and the application of AI to accelerate scientific discovery.

Keynote Speech 3

Speaker: Prof. Yongsheng Gao (Professor & Industry Laureate Fellow, Griffith University, Australia)

Speaker Biography: Yongsheng Gao is a Professor and Industry Laureate Fellow in the School of Engineering and Built Environment at Griffith University, Australia, and Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Driving Farming Productivity and Disease Prevention. He received his BSc and MSc from Zhejiang University, China, and his PhD from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is an active researcher with an international reputation in environmental informatics and very similar object classification. His research spans computer vision, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and their applications to pest and disease recognition, intelligent agriculture and aquaculture, biosecurity, face recognition, medical imaging, and biomedical engineering. He has made significant contributions to both fundamental theories and applied research that solve important industrial problems, and has published in prestigious venues including IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TIP, IEEE TNNLS, Pattern Recognition, IJCV, ICCV, IJCAI, AAAI, and CVPR. He has led numerous ARC Discovery and Linkage projects, including serving as Lead Chief Investigator of the ARC Research Hub with 21 investigators from six universities, CSIRO, and five industry partners.

Keynote Speech 4

Speaker: Prof. Ajmal Mian (Professor of Computer Science, The University of Western Australia)

Speaker Biography: Ajmal Mian is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Western Australia and is known for his research in artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. He has received three national fellowships from the Australian Research Council, including the Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008), the Australian Research Fellowship (2010), and the ARC Future Fellowship (2022). He is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), former President of the Australian Pattern Recognition Society, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He currently serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and previously served as Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, and IET Computer Vision. He has published over 380 scientific papers in high-ranked AI journals and conferences, supervised 37 PhD students to completion, and received numerous awards including the HBF Mid-Career Scientist of the Year Award, the West Australian Early Career Scientist of the Year Award, and the IAPR Best Scientific Paper Award. He was General Chair of DICTA 2024, DICTA 2019, and ACCV 2018, and has served as Program Chair of ICPR 2028 and Area Chair of ECCV, CVPR, ACM Multimedia, WACV, ICPR, and ACCV. His research interests include 3D computer vision, deep learning, 3D point cloud analysis, face recognition, human action recognition, and remote sensing.

Keynote Speech 5

Speaker: Dr Sue Keay (Director, UNSW AI Institute, Australia)

Speaker Biography: Dr Sue Keay is an expert in robotics, AI and automation. She is the Director of the UNSW AI Institute and founded Robotics Australia Group, the peak body for the robotics industry. With a background in science and a passion for cutting-edge technologies, Sue has led successful initiatives that bridge the gap between research and practical applications. Her expertise lies in leveraging robotics, AI and automation to solve complex challenges across various sectors. Sue is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), a member of the Kingston AI Group and Chief Executive Women, and serves on numerous advisory boards, including the board of the computer vision start-up Visionary Machines. She holds an MBA from The University of Queensland Business School, a PhD in Earth Sciences from ANU, and is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.