**Guandong Xu**，Professor
University of Technology Sydney, Australia

IET Fellow and ACS Fellow

Bio:

Dr Guandong Xu is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Data Science Institute at UTS and an award-winning researcher working in the fields of data mining, machine learning, social computing and other associated fields. Guandong is the Director of the UTS-Providence Smart Future Research Centre, which targets research and innovation in disruptive technology to drive sustainability. His research has attracted funding of more than $8 million from the ARC, government and industry. He also heads the Data Science and Machine Intelligence Lab, which is dedicated to research excellence and industry innovation across academia and industry, aligning with the UTS research priority areas in data science and artificial intelligence. Guandong has had more than 240 papers published in the fields of Data Science and Data Analytics, Recommender Systems, Text Mining, Predictive Analytics, User Behaviour Modelling, and Social Computing in international journals and conference proceedings in recent years, with increasing citations from academia. He has won numerous awards, including the Digital Disruptors Winner for ICT Research Project of the Year, Australian Computer Society (2021), the eBay's Leaders' Choice Award (2021); the CIKM'2021 Conference Best Research Paper Finalist; Global Efma-Accenture Insurance Innovation Award in Workforce Transformation (2020); the Digital Disruptors Winner for Skills Transformation of Small Work Teams, Australian Computer Society (2019), and the Digital Disruptors Gold Award of Service Transformation for the Digital Consumer – Corporate by Australian Computer Society (2019); the Top 10 Analytics Leaders by Australian Analytics Professional Peak Body (2018); the Australasian Database Conference Best Student Paper Award (2018); Marketing Excellence Award in Customer Research, NSW (2017), and; the Big Insights Data Innovation Award in Customer Insights (2016). He has shown strong academic leadership in various professional activities. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Human-centric Intelligent Systems Journal, the Assistant Editor-in-Chief of World Wide Web Journal, as well as the founding Steering Committee Chair of the International Conference of Behavioural and Social Computing Conference. Guandong has an MSc and a BSc in Computer Science and Engineering, and a PhD in Computer Science. After holding various research positions at European and Australian universities, he joined UTS in 2012. He was elected as the Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), UK and the Fellow of Australian Computer Society (ACS) in 2021 and 2022.

 

 Chaochao Chen, Assistant Professor
Zhejiang University

Bio:

Chaochao Chen is currently an Assistant Professor at the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University. Before that, He was a Staff Algorithm Engineer at Ant Group. He was also a visiting scholar at the Computer Science Department of UIUC. His research mainly focuses on privacy preserving machine learning, privacy-preserving data mining, and machine learning. Prof. Chen has published more than 60 papers in peer reviewed journals and conferences. He has also applied for more than 200 International and Chinese patents, and more than 100 of them have been issued.

 

 Fuli Feng, Professor
University of Science and Technology of China

Bio:

Fuli Feng is a professor in University of Science and Technology of China. He received Ph.D. in Computer Science from National University of Singapore in 2019. His research interests include information retrieval, data mining, causal inference and multi-media processing. He has over 90 publications appeared in several top conferences such as SIGIR, WWW, and SIGKDD, and journals including TKDE and TOIS. He has received the Best Paper Honourable Mention of SIGIR 2021 and Best Poster Award of WWW 2018. Moreover, he has been served as the PC member for several top conferences including SIGIR, WWW, SIGKDD, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL and invited reviewer for prestigious journals such as TOIS, TKDE, TNNLS, TPAMI.

 

 Usman Naseem, Lecturer/Assistant Professor
James Cook University , Australia

Bio:

Usman Naseem is a Lecturer at the College of the School of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Australia. His research interest lies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science, focusing on understanding human communication in social contexts and developing socially aware language technologies. Prior to persuading his research, he worked in leading ICT companies for over 10 years. He publishes and serves as Program Committee, including the Area Chair for several top-tier venues, including ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING, WSDM, Webconf, and AAAi. He also delivered several invited talks and a tutorial on recommender systems at Webconf 2023. His work in NLP has attracted attention from the World Health Organization and earned him the Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District Board Chair's Quality Award in 2021 and the prestigious IEEE Best Transactions Paper Award in 2022.