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Contact details:
CANBERRA ACT 2601 AUSTRALIA
Biography
Dr. Yanchang Zhao is a Principal Research Scientist and a Team Leader of the Causal and Explainable AI Team at Data61, CSIRO. Prior to that, he was a Data Analytics Lead with IBM Australia in 2017, a Senior Data Scientist with the Australian Government in 2009-2016 and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2007-2009.
He has ~20 years' hands-on experiences in data science and analytics and has authored/co-authored 100+ publications (incl. 4 books) on DM/ML research and applications. He has delivered dozens of talks (incl. keynote addresses, invited talks, tutorials and training courses) at universities, government, industry and international conferences.
He is a Founder of the Canberra Data Scientists Meetup Group. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has been a Steering Committee Member (2013-2023) and Co-Chair (since 2024) of the Australasian Data Science and Machine Learning Conference (AusDM), and a Program/Conference Chair for the AusDM conferences in 2012-2016, 2018-2022 & 2024-2025 and a Program Committee member for premier academic conferences in AI/ML/DM.
Research Interests:
* Interpretable/explainable AI
* Causal discovery and inference
A PC/SPC member of recent conferences:
* The ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2022-2024, 2026)
* The ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020-2026)
* The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2015-2018, 2023, 2025-2026)
* The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2018-2026)
* The Web Conference (WWW 2024, 2026)
* The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018-2020, 2025)
Guest Editor for the AusDM25 Special Issue with Journal of Big Data (Scimago Q1 - top 10%)
PhD scholarship opportunity: CSIRO Industry PhD Program Scholarship - Trustworthy LLM-powered summarisation and causal analysis of public submissions to government
Other Interests
- Hiking
- Camping
Achievements and Awards
-
2020-2020
DNFC Customer First Award – Highly Commended
CSIRO -
2020-2020
Best Paper Award of the Industry and Government Program
The IEEE Big Data 2020 Conference -
2020-2020
The 2020 IEEE Region 10 Outstanding Small Section Award
IEEE -
2018-2018
Research Innovation Award
The Australian Water Association
Professional Areas
Current Roles
-
Research Team Leader
Leading a research team on Causal and Explainable AI -
Senior Researcher on AI/ML projects
Research on AI and machine learning on projects in collaboration with government, industry and academia -
Co-supervisor of students
Co-supervising PhD students with RMIT and Adelaide University
Professional Experiences
-
2022-Present
Team Leader
Data61, CSIRO -
2023-Present
Principal Research Scientist
Data61, CSIRO -
2017-2023
Senior Research Scientist
Data61, CSIRO -
2017-2017
Data Analytics Lead
IBM Australia -
2011-2017
Senior Data Scientist
Department of Immigration -
2009-2011
Senior Data Mining Specialist
Department of Human Services -
2007-2009
Australian Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Industry (APDI)
University of Technology, Sydney
Grants
-
Jan 2019-Sept 2019
Data61 Challenge Grant on Smart City and Energy
-
2007-2009
ARC Linkage Project (LP0775041) on Data Mining of Activity Transactions to Strengthen Debt Prevention. $469,000.
-
2010-2013
ARC Linkage Project (LP100200774) on Detecting Significant Changes in Organisation Customer Interactions Leading to Non-Compliance. $300,000.
-
2009-2010
University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Early Career Researcher Grant (ECRG) project on Efficient Mining of Negative Sequential Patterns. $24,941.
-
2008-2009
UTS ECRG project on Combined Association Rule Mining. $25,000.
Community and Corporate Citizenship
-
2012-present
Steering Committee Member (since 2012) and Co-Chair (since 2024) of the Australasian Data Science and Machine Learning Conference (AusDM)
-
2023-present
Member of the Advisory Board of the Machine Learning for Social Good Centre at the University of Auckland, New Zealand
-
2014-present
Founder and organiser of the Canberra Data Scientists Meetup Group
-
2022-present
Editor of the International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management (IJDMMM)
-
2013-present
IEEE Senior Member
-
2023-2023
Chair of the 2023 ICDM Workshop on Causal and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (CXAI 2023)
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2019-2024
Chair of the Computer Society of the IEEE ACT Section
-
2023-2023
Chair of Computer Track of the IEEE TENSYMP 2023 Conference
-
2012-2022
Program/Conference Chair of the Australasian Data Science and Machine Learning Conference (AusDM) 2012-2016 & 2018-2022
Related links
ORCID 0000-0002-0209-3971
We have publications by Dr Yanchang Zhao