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Nicholas Evans is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University. He is an ARC Laureate Fellow and serves as Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), reflecting his leadership in integrating typology, descriptive linguistics, and cognitive science. His work spans linguistic diversity, endangered languages, and the interplay between language and culture. His research focuses on Australian and Papuan languages, with extensive fieldwork in remote communities. Key interests include linguistic typology, historical and contact linguistics, semantics, and the cognitive underpinnings of grammar. He has published foundational grammars and dictionaries of Kayardild, Bininj Gun-wok, and Dalabon, contributing significantly to the documentation of endangered languages. His recent publications reveal a strong trend in cross-linguistic studies of social cognition (SCOPIC), syntactic typology, and phylogenetic modeling of the Yam languages. These works integrate linguistic, cognitive, and genetic data, highlighting interdisciplinary approaches to understanding language evolution and human diversity. ARC Laureate Fellow Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA) Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) Evans supervises research students and leads major projects such as 'The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity' and CoEDL, which involve extensive collaboration across institutions and disciplines. His grants include modeling Pacific creoles and phonemic analysis of Tok Pisin. He is also involved in digital archiving initiatives like PARADISEC and the Language Data Commons of Australia, ensuring long-term preservation of linguistic data. He leads and contributes to research teams focused on Southern New Guinea languages, paradigm syncretisms (PARABANK), and cultural heritage preservation. His work emphasizes reciprocal engagement with speech communities and training the next generation of language documenters.

• Linguistic Typology
• Historical Linguistics
• Contact Linguistics
• +12 more

Trung Le is a Lecturer in the Department of Data Science & AI at Monash University. His research focuses on deep generative models, kernel methods, optimization in machine learning, and Bayesian inference, with applications to supervised learning, adversarial learning, and cyber security. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Canberra (2013). Key projects include the Australian Research Council-funded initiatives such as 'Can Machines Unlearn? Toward Next-Generation Safe Artificial Intelligence' (2025–2029) and 'Trustworthy Generative AI: Towards Safe and Aligned Foundation Models' (2024–2026). His work contributes to UN SDG 4 (Quality Education) through advancements in AI ethics and safety. Education: PhD in Computer Science, University of Canberra (2013) Research Areas: Continual Learning, Diffusion Models, Domain Adaptation, Adversarial Machine Learning Awards: KDD 2023 Best Student Paper Award, Imagine Cup 2010 Australia First Prize Trung has published extensively in top-tier venues like NIPS, ICLR, and JMLR, with over 100 outputs since 2009. His recent work emphasizes robustness in AI systems, including projects on adversarial defense and ethical concept erasure in generative models.

• Deep Generative Models
• Optimization for Machine Learning
• Kernel Methods
• +6 more

Dr. Yankee Modi is a Research Associate at the University of Sydney , affiliated with the Department of Linguistics and the Sydney Centre for Language Research . She serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural-Linguistic Diversity (Eastern Himalaya) and holds membership in the Vere Gordon Childe Centre . Education: BA (Hons) from Rajiv Gandhi University MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) MPhil from JNU PhD from University of Bern Her research focuses on documentation and description of Tibeto-Burman languages in the Eastern Himalayas, particularly those of the Milang tribe in Arunachal Pradesh, India. She specializes in community-led language projects, cultural prehistory reconstruction through proper names, and linguistic responses to geopolitical tensions. Recent projects include a 4-year community-led documentation initiative for 20 Eastern Himalayan languages in partnership with Firebird Foundation and University of North Texas. Publications span topics like applicative morphology, subject autonomy marking, and cultural linguistic diversity. Awards: Shortlisted finalist for 2019 Panini Award (Association for Linguistic Typology) She advocates for indigenous researcher sovereignty and has publicly challenged Chinese geopolitical influence in academic publishing, as seen in her 2023 commentary on retracted Himalayan research.

• Linguistics
• Cultural-Linguistic Diversity
• Tibeto-Burman Languages
• +4 more

Dr. Jing Jiang is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and a core member of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). As an ARC DECRA Fellow, she has secured over AU$2 million in research funding through multiple ARC grants, CSIRO/Data61 projects, and industry collaborations. Her work bridges theoretical advances in machine learning with practical applications across various domains. Dr. Jiang's research focuses on machine learning, particularly federated learning, reinforcement learning, and foundation models. She explores how to make these technologies work effectively in heterogeneous environments, addressing challenges like data privacy, non-IID data distributions, and efficient communication. Her work spans both theoretical foundations and practical implementations for real-world applications. Her publications demonstrate a strong trend toward personalized federated learning approaches, with significant contributions to recommender systems, time series analysis, and weather forecasting. She has developed novel techniques like variational autoencoder approaches for federated collaborative filtering and adaptive prompt learning for foundation models on devices. Dr. Jiang has received several notable recognitions: ARC DECRA Fellow Awardee of the Australian International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) Dr. Jiang has successfully led multiple major research projects, including two ARC Discovery Projects, one ARC Linkage Project, and a CSIRO/Data61 CRP project where she served as lead Chief Investigator. She has supervised numerous PhD and Master's students and actively collaborates with industry partners on applied research. As a core member of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) at UTS, Dr. Jiang contributes to a vibrant research ecosystem focused on cutting-edge AI research. She collaborates closely with Professor Guodong Long and other researchers on various machine learning projects, and serves in leadership roles including program co-chair for major conferences like ADMA2023.

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Federated Learning
• +3 more