Wayne Wobcke

Associate Professor Wayne Wobcke is a faculty member in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he has been employed since 2002. His academic career includes previous positions at the University of Sydney until 1998, British Telecom Labs in the UK for three years, and the University of Melbourne for one year. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex (1989), an MSc from the University of Queensland (1985), and a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics/Computer Science from the University of Queensland (1984).

Dr. Wobcke's research spans both theoretical and practical aspects of artificial intelligence and data science. His work encompasses intelligent agents, data mining, agent-based modeling, dialogue management, personal assistants, recommender systems, and computational social science. He has collaborated extensively with industry through three Cooperative Research Centres (Smart Internet Technology CRC, Smart Services CRC, and Data to Decisions CRC), where he served as a Programme Manager and Project Leader for over 10 years. Notable achievements include developing a voice-controlled mobile application for email and calendar interaction (a precursor to Apple's Siri) and deploying a people-to-people recommender system for online dating on one of Australia's largest dating sites.

His recent research focuses on data science in humanitarian contexts and machine learning applications in official statistics, conducted in collaboration with BPS (Statistics Indonesia) and STIS (Politeknik Statistika, Indonesia). His publication record shows a consistent trajectory of impactful research, with recent work concentrating on poverty targeting, domain adaptation, natural language processing for recommender systems, and political opinion mining.

Scientific Awards:

• Best Paper Nomination, 11th Workshop on Argument Mining (2024)
• UNSW Arc Postgraduate Research Supervisor Award (2017, 2018)
• AAAI Deployed AI Application Award, Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (2014)
• Best application paper runner up, 17th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2013)

Dr. Wobcke has successfully supervised numerous research students, with Irwan Rahadi currently working on 'Causal Modelling and Machine Learning for Official Statistics'. His grant portfolio includes significant funding from the Australian Research Council and various Cooperative Research Centres, totaling over $3.7 million since 2003. He teaches COMP9414 Artificial Intelligence and COMP9727 Recommender Systems at UNSW.