Prof. Nikola Kasabov - Director

Professor Nikola Kasabov is the Foundation Director of KEDRI, and a Chair of Knowledge Engineering at the School of Computer and Information Sciences at AUT, Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Fellow of the New Zealand Computer Society and a Senior Member of IEEE. He holds a MSc and PhD from the Technical University of Sofia. His main research interests are in the areas of : intelligent information systems, soft computing, neuro-computing, bioinformatics, brain study, speech and image processing, data mining and knowledge discovery.

phone: +64 9 921 9506
email: nkasabov@aut.ac.nz

More information on Prof. Nik Kasabov

Joyce D'Mello - KEDRI Manager and Personal Assistant to Prof. Nik Kasabov

Joyce is the Manager of KEDRI and also the Personal Assistant to the Director of KEDRI. Joyce provides administrative and secretarial services, maintains financial and personnel data and documentation of KEDRI, takes care of purchases, acts as a co-ordinator and contributes to the functioning of a high-performing team.

phone: +64 9 921 9504
email: joyce.dmello@aut.ac.nz

Peter Hwang - Research Officer, NeuCom Software Manager, Technical Support and PhD Student

Peter is the technical support at KEDRI and the manager of the NeuCom project. NeuCom is a complete software package for data processing. Visit the NeuCom website for more details. His research areas are neural networks, software agents, process modelling and software internationalisation. He is currently completing his PhD study on the topic of local and personalised modelling.

phone: +64 9 921 9526
email: peter.hwang@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

Prof. Stephen MacDonell - Deputy Director

Stephen G. MacDonell is Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Computer and Information Sciences Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. He holds BCom(Hons) and MCom degrees in information science from the University of Otago and a PhD in software engineering from the University of Cambridge. His main research activities are in the areas of software engineering, software measurement, project planning, estimation and management, data analysis, and software forensics. He is a member of the ACM and NZCS.

phone: +64 9 921 9773
email: smacdone@aut.ac.nz

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Asso. Prof. Frances Joseph - Associate Professor

Frances Joseph is Associate Professor in Art and Design at the Auckland University of Technology. She holds an MFA from the University of New South Wales and has worked as a designer in areas of sculpture, puppet design and animatronics. Since joining A.U.T. in 1997 her teaching and research interests have centred on design history and theory, with a focus on the representation of design knowledge. Frances was visiting research fellow at the Design History Research Centre, University of Brighton in 2002 and is a member of the Designers Institute of New Zealand. At KEDRI she is working on the development of design ontology and exploring potential applications of evolutionary computation to design problem solving.

phone: +64 9 921 9999 # 8750

email: frances.joseph@aut.ac.nz

Dr. Qun Song - Senior Research Fellow & Project Leader

Qun was awarded the “KEDRI Effort and Professionalism Award” for year 2002-2003.

Qun obtained his Bachelor degree, Masters degree and PhD degree from Textile University of China, Tokyo University of Mercantile Marine, Japan and Otago University, New Zealand respectively. The research fields he specialises in are AI systems, neural networks, fuzzy systems and their applications in prediction, control and image processing.

phone: +64 9 921 9525
email: qsong@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

Dr. Paul Shaoning Pang - Senior Research Fellow

Dr. Shaoning Pang holds B. Sc. in physics, M. Sc. in electronic engineering, and Ph.D. in computer science. From 2001 to 2003, he worked as a research associate in Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea. His research interests include SVM Aggregating Intelligence, Incremental Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, and Industrial Business Intelligence Systems and Strategies. He has been serving as a program member and session chair for several international conferences including ISNN, ICONIP. ICNNSP. He was a best paper winner of IEEE ICNNSP 2003. He is currently acting as a paper reviewer for IEEE Transaction on SMC-Part B, Image and Vision Computing Journal and Pattern Recognition Letter, and a guest editor for International Journal of Computers, Systems and Signals.

Dr. Pang is a Senior Member of IEEE, and a Member of IEICE, and ACM

phone: +64 9 921 9580
email: spang@aut.ac.nz

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Dr. Lubica Benuskova - Senior Research Fellow and Project Leader

Luba has got a Master degree in Psychology from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA and a PhD degree in Biophysics from Comenius niversity, Bratislava, Slovakia. Her research interests include biological modeling, e.g. modeling brain plasticity, and investigation of relationships between genes, brain functions and artificial neural networks.

phone: +64 9 921 9343
email: lbenusko@aut.ac.nz

Publication List

Dr. Mark Laws - Director of the Laboratory for English and Maori Translation Systems

Mark has a Masters and PhD degree in Information Science from the University of Otago.He has a 3 year Post-Doctoral fellowship at KEDRI where he will integrate selected Polynesian languages using similar data models and language frameworks developed for the Maori language. This will provide the foundations for further research in to languages, linguistics and computing. Mark's primary research goal will be to piece together selected Polynesian language and linguistic elements to build a speech and language database management system. This database will contain the lexical, phonological and phonetic frameworks which will provide the core components for a Polynesian speech and language database translation system.

Mark has just completed a visiting fellowship at the University of Hawaii, and is currently visiting the Tribal University of Te Whare Wananga O Awanuiarangi in Whakatane to assist in the development of indiginous speech and language information technology based degrees.

email: mark.laws@aut.ac.nz

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Dr. Ilkka Havukkala – Associate Researcher

Dr Havukkala received his PhD in Zoology from Imperial College, University of London and is a Docent of Zoology at University of Helsinki, Finland. His past research spans insect behaviour modelling by Markov chains, insect orientation and host selection behaviour, biological control, fungal enzymology and plant and microbial molecular biology. He worked in 1991-1996 as bioinformatician in the Japanese Rice Genome Program, and in 1996-2005 in New Zealand biotechnology company Genesis R&D working on plant, microbial and animal genomics and developing RNAi therapeutics. He is an inventor in a number of genomics related patents and was European Union Advising Expert on epigenomics and medical informatics in 2004-2005. His current interests include discovery and classification of non-coding RNAs from genomic data and utilization of neural computing methods in bioinformatics and biotechnology.

phone: +64-9-921-9534

email: ilkka.havukkala@aut.ac.nz

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Dr. Defoin Platel Michael  - Associate Research

Dr. Defoin Platel Michael received a M. Sc. in Bio-Informatics from the University of Paris 5, France and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Nice, France. His main research activities are the Evolutionary Algorithms (with emphasis on Genetic Programming), Inverse Problems solving and the development of new Machine Learning techniques. From 2004 to 2006, he was funded by the CNES (the French national centre for spatial studies) and worked at the LOV (a French Laboratory studying oceanography) on the ocean colour inverse problem. Since January 2007, he is now Associate Research Fellow at KEDRI to define the Dynamical Spiking Neural Networks Systems and create the future Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithms.

phone: +64 9 921 9546

email: michael.defoinplatel@aut.ac.nz

Publication List

Professor Ajit Narayanan is the head of school of computing and mathematical sciences. His teaching areas are artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, quantum computing, scientific computing and cognitive science.His research areas are application of artificial intelligence techniques in bioinformatics and systems biology; computational statistics, modelling and simulation.

email: ajit.narayanan@aut.ac.nz

More information on Prof. Ajit Narayanan

Assoc. Prof. Brett Collins - Associate Researcher

Brett is the Marketing Discipline Chair in AUT’s Business Faculty. After 20 years international experience in line and general management, he joined the Graduate School of Management in Melbourne Australia. He holds a M.Sc. from Canterbury, with an M.B.A. and Ph.D. in finance from Melbourne University. His main teaching and research interests are centred on marketing strategy, value-based management, and theory development using neurocomputing and simulation. Brett serves on the editorial board of European Marketing Journal. He has published 23 journal articles across European Marketing Journal, Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, Labour Economics and Productivity, Australasian Marketing Journal, European Management Journal, The Investment Analyst and Journal of Business Finance and Accounting.

phone: +64 9 921 9999 ext: 5444
email: brett.collins@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

Dr. Russel Pears - Associate Researcher

Russel holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics, and Masters and PhD degrees in Computing Science from the University of Cardiff, United Kingdom. Russel is a Senior Lecturer at the school of Computer and Information Science at the Auckland University of Technology, where he teaches Data Mining and Research methods. He has a strong interest in Machine Learning and is currently involved in several projects in this area, including classification methods for imbalanced data sets, dynamic credit scoring methods, contextual search techniques and mining high speed data streams.

phone: +64-9-9219999 ext 5344

email: rpears@aut.ac.nz

Dr. Dave Parry - Associate Researcher

Dave's research interests are internet based knowledge management, health informatics and information retrieval. He is finishing a PhD thesis on the topic of "An intelligent system for finding useful information on the internet".

phone: +64 9 921 9999 ext 8918
email: dave.parry@aut.ac.nz

Publication List

Akbar Ghobakhlou - Associate Researcher

Akbar's main area of research is the development of neural networks based speech recognition systems, using Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECOS). Speaker adaptation is an important issue which is being investigated in his research along with adaptive noise cancellation and adaptive word end-point detection. An implementation of a speech recognition system developed using ECOS is currently under way.

phone: +64 9 921 9547
email: akbar@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

Vishal Jain - PhD student (KEDRI), Lecturer and co-ordinator of bioinformatics (AUT)

Vishal Jain obtained his Bachelors (H) and Master degrees (Biotechnology) from India with distinction records. He holds throughout first class academic records and has won many awards and scholarships at national and university level. In India, he carried out research work on Mycobacterium tuberculosis at National Institute of Immunology (NII), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and also worked as a visiting lecturer in biotechnology/bioinformatics modules for postgraduate students. At KEDRI, his current interest lies in solving various problems in system biology like modelling Gene regulatory Networks (GRN), predicting Protein-protein interactions, micro-RNA functional classification and neurogenetic brain-gene ontology modelling using novel bioinformatics methods and evaluation using experimental knowledge.

phone: +64 9 921 9341
email: vishal.jain@aut.ac.nz

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Simei Gomes Wysoski – PhD student

Simei received his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Parana, Brazil in 2000, and M.E. degree in 2003, in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan. His current interests include image processing, pattern recognition, evolving connectionist systems and modelling brain functions.

phone: +64 9 921 9577
email: swysoski@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

Paulo Gottgtroy - PhD Student

Paulo Gottgtroy received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree from the Brazilian Air Force Academy in 1984 and a post-graduate degree in system analysis from Pontificial Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1989. He received a MSc degree from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte - Brazil in 2000. His research interests are ontology learning, onto-mining, biomedical informatics ontologies, and mining techniques. Currently he is integrating ontologies and data mining in order to improve the knowledge discovery process.

phone: +64 9 921 9577
email: pgottgtr@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

David Zhang - PhD Student

David Zhang is a part-time research officer at Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI) and currently pursuing his PhD at AUT under the supervision of Prof. Nik Kasabov and Senior Lecturer Dr. George Coghill (Auckland University). David’s interests are in Artificial Intelligence and speech and image recognition with neural network technology.

phone: +64 9 921 9556
email: dzhang@aut.ac.nz

Publication list

Maggie (Tian Min) Ma - PhD student

Maggie is a PhD student of KEDRI, under supervision of Professor Nik Kasabov, Dr. Qun Song and Dr. Mark Marshall. Her study and research work is mainly on "Evolving Connectionist System for Medical Diagnosis and Prediction" which will enable patients to know their expected longevity on haemodialysis, administrators to engage in more accurate service planning, and medical care to be targeted at specifically those with high risk on haemodialysis. Maggie Ma has been awarded a Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship from the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC).

phone: +64 9 921 9564
email: mmaa@aut.ac.nz

Publication List

In his research Boris aims to make a contribution to automating the analysis of human sporting activity data using tennis as initial case study. The main goal is to develop a methodology and an environment that enable data analysis and modelling of sporting activity data for a single player. The topic of his PhD thesis is "Connectionist Methods for Data Analysis and Modelling of Human Sporting Activities"

phone: +64 9 921 9999 ext 5115
email: bbacic@aut.ac.nz

Snjezana Soltic - PhD student

Snjezana Soltic obtained her B.E. and M.Sc.Eng. degrees in Electronic Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia. She is currently enrolled as a Ph.D. student at Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. Since 1996, she has been lecturing at Manukau Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests are in areas of neural networks, data mining and image processing.

phone: +64-9-968 8000 ext 8219
email: snjezana.soltic@manukau.ac.nz

Publication List

Anju Verma - PhD student

Anju Verma's research interests are nutrigenomics related to aging and diabetes. Her PhD topic is "Personalised Modelling Based on Selected Gene DNA data and their use for Personal Decision-making". She is doing her Phd under the supervision of Prof. Nikola Kasabov and Dr. Qun Song.

phone: 64-9-921-9556

email: averma@aut.ac.nz

Publication List

Raphael(Yingjie) Hu - PhD Student

Raphael has received his MCIS degree (Hons) in Computer and Information Sciences from Auckland University of Technology in 2006. He is a PhD student at KEDRI under the supervision of Prof. Nikola Kasabov and Dr. Paul Pang and is currently working on the project of the construction of integrated models for gene data analysis. His research interests are in the areas of neural network computing, fuzzy logic systems and data mining techniques.

phone: +64 9 921 9578
email: raphael.hu@aut.ac.nz

Publication List

Alex K Tjahjana - PhD Student

Alex received his BEng in Software Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) from Tarumanagara University, Indonesia in 2000, where he was the best graduate university wide. He received a Post-graduate Diploma in Commerce majoring Information Systems and Operations Management from University of Auckland in 2006. His current research interests include ontology learning, integration of ontology and knowledge discovery process; decision support systems; neural networks, fuzzy logic, and their applications in pattern recognition; system dynamics and software development.

phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86517

email: alexkusuma@1sweetlove.com

Lawrence (Yufei) Wang - Master Student

Lawrence is currently working on his thesis in KEDRI with his supervisors, Paulo and Vishal. Mainly, his thesis work is the development of Brain Gene Ontology. The interesting domains of Lawrence are Distributed Computing technologies (middleware, Grid computing, software agency etc.), Groupware and protein sequence analysis.

phone: 64-021 100 1374
email: yuxwan10@aut.ac.nz