members

Our Team

Our research group has provided support to honours, postgraduate, and doctoral students, as well as professional researchers from the University of Auckland.

Lab Director

Dr. Michael Witbrock

Dr. Michael Witbrock

Professor

Michael’s research is 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.

Postdoctoral Researchers

Dr. Alex Peng

Dr. Alex Peng

Research Fellow

Alex’s research focuses on NLP tasks and automated reasoning with neural networks.

Dr. Yang Chen

Dr. Yang Chen

Research Fellow

Yang’s research focus is on applying reinforcement learning to automatic reasoning and proving.

PhD Students

Stefan Fuchs

Stefan Fuchs

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

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

Qiming Bao

Qiming Bao

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

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

Yonghua Zhu

Yonghua Zhu

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

Inductive Reasoning over Multiple Texts for Reading Comprehension

Sam Wei

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

Dr. Neşet Tan

PhD Candidate | 2020 – 2024

Gaël Gendron

Gaël Gendron

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2024

Robust reasoning in Deep Learning engines with Causal Graph modelling

Tim Hartill

Tim Hartill

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2024

Teaching Smaller Language Models To Generalise To Unseen Compositional Questions

Andrey Borro

Andrey Borro

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2025

Generating Optimal Path Subgoals through Supervised Learning

Minjung Kim

Minjung Kim

PhD Candidate | 2021 – 2025

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

Nathan Young

Nathan Young

PhD Candidate | 2022 – 2025

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

Kobe Knowles

Kobe Knowles

PhD Candidate | 2022 – 2025

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

Timothy Pistotti

Timothy Pistotti

PhD Candidate | 2022 – 2025

Leveraging Linguistic Knowledge for Low-resource Natural Language Processing

Alumni

Dr. Diana Benavides Prado

Dr. Diana Benavides Prado

Lecturer

Diana’s research focuses in the areas of lifelong/continual learning and human-centred AI.

Dr. Trung Ngyuen

Dr. Trung Ngyuen

Research Fellow

Trung’s research centers on modularizing deep learning models to enhance specialization, interpretability, and scalability.

Dr. Vithya Yogarajan

Dr. Vithya Yogarajan

Research Fellow

Vithya’s research is motivated by the advancements of technology, and what AI can do to improve lives.

Dr. Joshua Bensemann

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

Dr. Aaron Keesing

PhD | 2019 – 2023

Classifying Emotions Across Variations in Speech Data

Dr. Qianqian Qi

Dr. Qianqian Qi

PhD | 2019 – 2023

Incorporating Multiple Types of Information in Condition Text Generation

Dr. Zhenyun Deng

Dr. Zhenyun Deng

PhD | 2019 – 2023

Interpretable Multi-hop Question Answering

Ming-Bin (Bryan) Chen

Ming-Bin (Bryan) Chen

MSc | 2020 – 2021

Open domain interviewing agent

Ziqi Wang

Ziqi Wang

MSc | 2020 – 2021

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

Join our team

The Strong AI Lab has immediate opportunities for Ph.D. Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, and Senior Research Programmers.