UTS unveils Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has launched the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) to contribute to Australia’s AI capabilities and, via high-impact research, to the role of AI on Australian economic and social advancement. AAII will conduct an AI research program with fundamental and applied research using interrelated technologies to drive progress for a range of sectors, including health care, financial services, transport, Internet of Things (IoT), education and defence.

The institute will be led by Distinguished Professor Jie Lu, an expert in fuzzy machine learning and its impact on data-driven decision-making. Lu predicts that the institute will enhance UTS and Australia’s reputation in AI, particularly machine learning.

“AAII will build world-class AI research capacity in Australia and globally through links with national and international researchers, research communities and industries in machine learning and decision support systems,” Professor Lu said.

Harnessing the power of AI, the institute offers eight discrete laboratories, including the Computational Intelligence and Brain Computer Interface Lab, which develops wireless headsets for medical and industrial applications, and the Data Science and Knowledge Discovery Laboratory, which strives to reshape business intelligence by empowering NLP with deep learning techniques. The institute’s Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab (Magic Lab) is home to Australia’s leading social robotics group, while the Biomedical Data Science Lab undertakes projects in cancer diagnostics/treatment.

The Decision Systems and e-Service Intelligence Lab strives to advance knowledge and methodologies to support big data-driven decision-making, while the Large-Scale Network Analytics Lab recently received funding for ARC Future Fellow Lu Qin to investigate graph analysis. The Recognition, Learning and Reasoning Lab aims to develop innovative computer vision algorithms and help machines understand humans. The institute’s Intelligent Drone Lab developed the award-winning software for the Spotter suite of drones to identify threats from sharks and crocodiles.

Professor Lu is leading a $3.3 million major project within the institute to develop autonomous learning for decision-making in complex situations and to improve the scale and focus of machine learning-based decision-making research and its applications.

“We aim to create a novel research direction — autonomous machine learning for data-driven decision-making from big data that supports decision-making in complex situations. This project will give a new set of theories, methodologies and algorithms to learn autonomously from data, and assist machine-learning to effectively handle tremendous uncertainties in data,” Professor Lu said.

This project will enable smart learning in massive domains, massive streams and massive-agent environments working with industry partners in health care, transportation, agriculture and logistics and transportation, and is further supported by UTS with an additional $2.3 million in funding.

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