Grants & Awards

Grants

• 2024-2027, "Machine Learning for Emergency Medical Dispatch: A Data Driven Approach", MBIE Endeavour Smart Idea Fund, $1,000,000 NZD. (PI)
• 2024-2027, "Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimisation: An Evolutionary Computation Approach", New Zealand Royal Society Catalyst Leaders Fund, $150,000 NZD. (PI)
• 2022-2023, "Te Taupanga Tapoi: A Post-COVID Kaupapa Māori Tour Recommendation System", VUW Faculty Strategic Research Grant SHEADI, $49,000 NZD. (PI)
• 2022-2023, "Te Kapahaka Punaha Taupanga (The Kapahaka Software Judging System)", SfTI Seed Project Fund, $200,000 NZD. (Co-PI)
• 2020-2027, "A data-science driven evolution of aquaculture for building the blue economy (AI/ML Advanced Research and Applications to Aquaculture)", MBIE SSIF Fund on Data Science, $13,000,000 NZD. (Theme Leader and Key Researcher)
• 2019-2020, "AI/ML techniques for Waste Collection in NZ", industrial project with Northland Waste, $16,000 NZD. (PI)
• 2017-2020, "Automatic Design of Heuristics for Dynamic Arc Routing Problem with Genetic Programming", 16-VUW-079, Marsden Fund Fast-Start Grant, $300,000 NZD. (Sole PI)
• 2018, "Real-Time Tourist Trip Recommendation using Genetic Programming", University Research Fund, Victoria University of Wellington, $28,720 NZD (Sole PI)
• 2016-2018, "Digital Data in Schools: An Exploration of Research and Practice", Victoria University of Wellington Digital Future Grant, $20,000 NZD (Co-PI)
• 2017, "Evolving Interpretable Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Rules with GP", Research Establishment Grant, Victoria University of Wellington, $10,000 NZD (Sole PI)
• 2014, RMIT Near-miss grant ($25,000 AUD awarded for being ranked top 10% of the unsuccessful applications for the 2014 ARC DECRA funding)
• 2009, IEEE CIS Walter Karplus Summer Research Grant

Awards

• 2023, Best Poster Award Runner-Up: Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (paper)
• 2023, Best Student Paper Award Runner-Up: Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (paper)
• 2023, HUMIES Silver Award: ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2023
• 2023, Best Paper Award: ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GP Track (paper)
• 2022, Victoria University of Wellington Post-Graduate Student Association Supervisor Award (Honourable Mention)
• 2022, Best Paper Award: ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, ECOM Track (paper)
• 2022, Best Paper Award: European Conference on Genetic Programming (paper)
• 2018, Victoria University of Wellington Early Career Research Excellence Award
• 2018, Best Paper Award Runner-Up: Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (paper)
• 2018, Best Paper Award Runner-Up: International Conference on Web Services (ARC/CORE Rank A) (paper)
• 2017, Outstanding Paper Award: IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (top journal in EC) (paper)
• 2016, Best Paper Nomination: European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization (paper)
• 2014, 2nd Prize, Competition at IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence: Optimisation of Problems with Multiple Interdependent Components (as sole algorithm designer and programmer)
• 2010, Chinese Academy Of Sciences Dean’s Award (Top 200 postgraduates all over China)