Professor Nikola Kasabov, FRSNZ, FNZCS, Founding Director and Chief Scientist

KEDRI - the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute of Auckland University of Technology was established in June 2002 and since then has been developing novel information processing methods, technologies and their applications to enhance discoveries across different areas of science and engineering. The methods are mainly based on principles from Nature, such as brain information processing, evolution, genetics, quantum physics.  
    
KEDRI research team includes 6 senior research fellows, 20 PhD and Masters students, 6 associate senior researchers. Three of our PhD students have been awarded Top Achiever Doctoral (TAD) Awards by the Tertiary Education Commission.

KEDRI reports to the AUT PVC Research. Administratively it is allocated in the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies. Along with the internal funding from AUT, we have received more than $3.8 mln. external funding from the New Economy Research Fund – NERF/FRST, from research and commercial partners - Fonterra, Telecom, Middlemore hospital, PEBL, Intuto, ViaLactia BS, the SCOPE project, the CORE Bioprotection, and others.
 
KEDRI researchers have published  2 monograph books, 60 papers in top professional journals (such as IEEE Transactions, Neural Networks, Neurocomputing, Pattern Recognition, AI in Medicine, Springer LNCS), 70 papers in international conference proceedings, 15 book chapters and 2 PCT patents. In the 2006 NZ PBRF review, KEDRI achieved an average score of 7, and ranks among the top in the subject area.    

KEDRI relies on a strong collaboration with NZ academic and commercial partners, and international partners from 12 countries. KEDRI’s international reputation was enhanced by hosting 4 international conferences on Neuro-Computing and Evolving Intelligence (NCEI), 3 international summer schools on Bioinformatics. KEDRI is going to be the host of the premier Asia-Pacific Neural Network Assembly Conference ICONIP’08 (26-28.11.2008).     

KEDRI has 5 research centres and one laboratory that reflect the projects undertaken: (1) Neurocomputing and Computational Intelligence; (2) Neuroinformatics and Brain Study; (3) Bioinformatics; (4) Data Mining and Decision Support Systems; (5) Adaptive Pattern Recognition Systems; (6) English and Maori translation systems.

The 5th Anniversary of KEDRI is an opportunity to acknowledge the researchers and the achievements of the Institute, to reflect critically on our work, and to look forward to new horizons and new challenges. I would like to acknowledge the tremendous support we have received from the VC and the DVC of AUT, from the Research Office and the AUT Technology Park, from the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies and from the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, from NERF/FRST and from our research partners in NZ and overseas. Thank you all!

KEDRI's Computational Intelligence Repository is now accessible here