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​Ram Yegappan is an early career researcher at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at The University of Queensland (UQ). They completed their PhD in September 2023, focusing on understanding the science and application of snake venom proteins in wound healing. Ram has authored 8 research articles (4 as first author, 2 as co-first author) and 1 book chapter. These publications not only showcase their contributions to the field but also underscore their proficiency in conducting impactful research that translates into practical applications. In addition, they have also served as peer reviewer for journals and have reviewed over 30 research and review articles. Ram’s track record of honours and awards demonstrate their commitment to academic and research excellence, further enhancing his credibility as an emerging leader in this field.

In their current role, Ram manages multiple projects, conducting experiments at the interface of materials and cells, related to wound healing applications. They collaborate with researchers on project design, protocol preparation, data analysis and validation, statistical analysis and interpretation of findings, grant applications, and publications. Ram brings valuable expertise in the development and evaluation of next-generation biomaterials for wound healing applications, including the development of animal models for wound healing, in vivo evaluations, functional assays, as well as biochemical and histological evaluations. They have generated preliminary data for several grant proposals, and their foundational work formed the basis of two successful grants from the US Department of Defense and a CUREator, progressing the outcomes to preclinical stages.

Dr Loic Yengo is a Professor of Statistical Genomics at The University of Queensland (UQ) and Group Leader of the Statistical Genomics Laboratory within UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience. He was awarded a prestigious Snow Medical Research Fellowship in 2024 to dramatically advance the use of genomics to prevent chronic disease such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s, with a particular focus on increasing participation of people with diverse ancestries. After completing a PhD in applied mathematics and statistics at the University of Lille (France) in 2014, he joined UQ in 2016 for postdoctoral training in Quantitative and Statistical Genetics. Loic started his own lab in 2020 to investigate the causes and consequences of genetic variation within and between human populations. His group develops and applies novel statistical methods to analyse large volumes of genomic data. Loic’s research has contributed to improving understanding of the genetic and phenotypic consequences of non-random mating (inbreeding and assortative mating) in human populations and has led to identifying novel genetic variants associated with complex traits and diseases. Loic was named among the top 40 rising stars of research by The Australian newspaper in 2021 and received the UQ Foundation research excellence award the same year. Loic is the 2022 recipient of the Ruth Stephens Gani Medal of the Australian Academy of Science recognizing outstanding contributions to research in human genetics, and was named in Nature Medicine’s 2022 Yearbook among 11 early-career researchers “to watch”.

In 2024, he was the recipient of the American Society of Human Genetics Early Career Award and a Snow Medical Research Foundation Fellowship to accelerate the deployment of genomic risk prediction in the clinic and improve the benefit of genomic medicine in all populations.

I have a multidisciplinary background in chemical and civil engineering, chemistry and materials science. Currently, I am the UQ leader of the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life, based at USC. I apply my expertise to understand the effects of fungal decay and moisture intrusion in timber connections, as well as the improvement of the fire performance of timber. I supervise 6 PhD students.

Mehmet Yildirimoglu is a Senior Lecturer of Transport Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering. Mehmet received his B.Sc. degree in civil engineering from the Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2009, M.Sc. degree in civil engineering from the Rutgers University in 2011 and Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2015. Prior to joining the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland in 2016, he was a Postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, Switzerland. His research revolves around large-scale traffic modeling, dynamic traffic assignment, data mining techniques and real-time traffic management.

Dr Tesfa Yimer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research, The University of Queensland. Tesfa’s PhD was on mental health systems in low resource settings, particularly focusing on depression and alcohol use disorder. His research interest is on addiction and mental health epidemiology.

Prof. Hongzhi Yin works as an ARC Future Fellow and Professor and director of the Responsible Big Data Intelligence Lab (RBDI) at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has made notable contributions to predictive analytics, recommendation systems, graph learning, social media analytics, and decentralized and edge intelligence. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his research achievements. He has been named to IEEE Computer Society’s AI’s 10 to Watch 2022 and Field Leader of Data Mining & Analysis in The Australian's Research 2020 magazine. In addition, he has received the prestigious 2023 Young Tall Poppy Science Awards, Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 2021, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2016, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award 2019, Rising Star of Science Award (2022-2024) and 2024 Computer Science in Australia Leader Award, AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Data Mining (2022-2025). His research has won 8 international and national Best Paper Awards, including Best Student Full Paper Award at CIKM 2024, Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention at WSDM 2023, Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, Best Student Paper Award at DASFAA 2020, Best Paper Award Nomination at ICDM 2018, ACM Computing Reviews' 21 Annual Best of Computing Notable Books and Articles, Best Paper Award at ADC 2018 and 2016. His Ph.D. thesis won Peking University Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2014 and CCF Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award (Nomination) 2014. He has ten conference papers recognized as the Most Influential Papers in Paper Digest, including KDD 2021 and 2013, AAAI 2021, SIGIR 2022, WWW 2023 and 2021, CIKM 2021, 2019, 2016, and 2015. He has published over 350+ papers with an H-index of 86 (24000+ citations), including 280+ CCF A/CORE A* and 70+ CCF B/CORE A, such as ICML, KDD, SIGIR, WWW, ACL, WSDM, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, ACM Multimedia, ECCV, IEEE TKDE, TNNL, VLDB Journal, and ACM TOIS. He has been the leading author (first/co-first author or corresponding author) for 250+. He has been an SPC/PC member for many top conferences, such as AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, VLDB, ICDE, ICDM, and CIKM. He has been serving as Associate Editor/Guest Editor/Editorial Board for Neural Networks (JCR Q1, CCF B, 中科院一区), Science China Information Sciences (JCR Q1, CCF A, 中科院一区), Data Science and Engineering (JCR Q1, 中科院一区), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST, CCF B), Journal of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2022-2023 (JCR Q1, CCF A, CORE A, 中科院一区), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2020-2021 (JCR Q1), Information Systems 2020-2021 (CORE A*), and World Wide Web 2020-2021 and 2017-2018 (CORE A, CCF B). Dr. Yin has also been attracting wide media coverage, such as The Australian, SBS Radio Interviews, UQ News, Sohu.com, Faculty News of EAIT, IEEE Computer Society, ACM Computing Reviews.

I am now looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students. The University of Queensland ranks in the top 50 as measured by the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The University also ranks 40 in the QS World University Rankings and 41 in the US News Best Global Universities Rankings. The University of Queensland is the best in Australia according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), which has now ranked UQ in the #1 position for 2 consecutive years. Please find the following two PhD scholarships.

• https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/building-trustworthy-information-recommendation-system

• https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/build-trustworthy-information-recommendation-system

Latest News

1. [28 August 2025] I have been recognised in the "2025 AI 2000 Global Artificial Intelligence Scholars List" and awarded the "2025 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention" in both areas of Data Mining (Ranked #43) and IR and Recommendation (Ranked #60).

2. [26 August 2025] Our research work "Towards Propagation-aware Representation Learning for Supervised Social Media Graph Analytics" was accetped as regular research paper by the top confernce ICDM 2025 (CORE A*, acceptance rate 13.5%).

3. [5 August 2025] We have 4 research papers accepted by the top conference CIKM 2025 (CORE A).

   • Harnessing Large Language Models for Group POI Recommendations

   • Efficient Multimodal Streaming Recommendation via Expandable Side Mixture-of-Experts

   • HGAurban: Heterogeneous Graph Autoencoding for Urban Spatial-Temporal Learning

   • NR-GCF: Graph Collaborative Filtering with Improved Noise Resistance

4. [10 July 2025] Our survey paper "On-Device Recommender Systems: A Comprehensive Survey" has been accepted by Data Science and Engineering (Q1, 中科院一区).

5. [25 June 2025] Our ARC Linkage Project "Revolutionise Australian Strata Management with Large Language Model" has been granted and funded.

6. [5 May 2025] I was invited to serve as Area Chair for the top data mining conference ICDM 2025 (CORE A*).

7. [23 May 2025] I was ranked #52 in Australia among Best Scientists for 2025 and have also been recognized with the Computer Science Leader Award for 2025 in Research.com.

8. [15 May 2025] We have four research papers and one applied data science paper accepted by the top conference KDD 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

   • Progressive Generalization Risk Reduction for Data-Efficient Causal Effect Estimation

   • Contrastive Graph Condensation: Advancing Data Versatility through Self-Supervised Learning

   • Data Watermarking for Sequential Recommender Systems

   • FLUID-MMRec: Stein-Guided Entropic Flow for Multi-Modal Sequential Recommendation

   • Multi-task Offline Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising in Recommender Systems

9. [11 May 2025] Our research work "RobGC: Towards Robust Graph Condensation" has been accepted by the top journal TKDE 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A). Congratulations to Xinyi.

10. [1 May 2025] Our research work "Enhancing Treatment Effect Estimation via Active Learning: A Counterfactual Covering Perspective" has been accepted by the top conference ICML 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A). Congratulations to Hechuan.

11. [4 April 2025] We have four full research papers accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

    • ID-Free Not Risk-Free: LLM-Powered Agents Unveil Risks in ID-Free Recommender Systems

    • Diversity-aware Dual-promotion Poisoning Attack on Sequential Recommendation

    • Towards Distribution Matching between Collaborative and Language Spaces for Generative Recommendation

    • STAR-Rec: Making Peace with Length Variance and Pattern Diversity in Sequential Recommendation

12. [2 April 2025] Congratulations to the four new doctors, Dr. Wei Yuan, Dr. Jing Long, Dr. Yuting Sun and Dr. Ruiqi Zheng, who were awarded their PhD by The University of Queensland.

13. [10 March 2025] Our survey paper "A Survey on Point-of-Interest Recommendation: Models, Architectures, and Security " has been accepted by TKDE 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

14. [21 Feb 2025] Our joint foundation work "On the Trustworthiness of Generative Foundation Models– Guideline, Assessment, and Perspective" has been released on both arXiv and Hugging Face. This research is the result of a broad collaboration with leading universities and research institutions worldwide, including the University of Notre Dame, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, University of California, Santa Barbara, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, The University of Queensland and more.

15. [20 Feb 2025] I have been recognized as a Highly Ranked Scholar - Prior 5 Years (top 0.05% of all scholars) and #15 in Data Mining on ScholarGPS.

16. [26 January 2025] Our survey paper "Graph Condensation: A Survey" has been accepted by TKDE 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

17. [20 January 2025] We have three full research papers and one demo paper accepted by the top conference WWW 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

    • Rethinking and Accelerating Graph Condensation: A Training-Free Approach with Class Partition

    • On-device Content-based Recommendation with Single-shot Embedding Pruning: A Cooperative Game Perspective

    • Epidemiology-informed Network for Robust Rumor Detection

    • BiasNavi: LLM-Empowered Data Bias Management

18. [18 January 2025] We have two research papers accepted by AAAI 2025 (CCF A, CORE A*) for Oral Presentation.

    • Efficient Traffic Prediction through Spatio-Temporal Distillation

    • Rethinking Cancer Gene Identification through Graph Anomaly Analysis

Ming Yong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UQ Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation and the School of Chemical Engineering, University of Queensland, under the mentorship of Prof. Xiwang Zhang since February 2025. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Monash University (2021–2025), where he worked under the supervision of Dr. Zhikao Li, Prof. Xiwang Zhang, and Prof. Huanting Wang. At UQ, Ming’s current research focuses on developing high-performance porous membranes for applications in protein purification, lithium recovery, and redox flow batteries.

Emily is an experienced evaluator and policy analyst whose experience is designing, collecting and interpreting high quality evidence to improve outcomes for priority groups. She has deep, strategic knowledge of the Australian public sector, working alongside government agencies to design, implement and evaluate large, complex social policy initiatives.

Emily's motivated by helping her clients to use evaluation and research to understand the people they serve - conumers, service providers, Executive sponsors, advocacy groups - to deliver tailored programs and achieve better outcomes both for people and human service systems.

Her ability to build rapid rapport, synthesise complex information and balance perspectives means she is an in-demand strategic facilitator and trusted advisor to the executives of government agencies.

Her work creates impact because of her ability to connect information and people. She's great at taking complex information and making it simple and easy to action.

I have over 10 years of research and work experience in the field of mining land rehabilitation, acquiring a total of>3.5 million in fund support from the Australian government, research council and mining companies. My extensive experience in industrial engagement, field trial design and application also increased my growth as the leader in sustainable mining waste management.

I am an Advanced Queensland research fellow in the leading global research group of Ecological Engineering of Mine Wastes at the Sustainable Mineral Institute (SMI). My research interest is investigating important molecular and cellular processes in eukaryotes that first arose in bacteria and archaea, and microbial metabolic activities control numerous geochemical cycles in soil formation for sustainable mineral waste management. I have intensive work experience on multiple representative mining wastes, including Cu-Au, Pb-Zn, Iron ore, Uranium mine waste rock and bauxite tailings and residues.

My research strength lies in my multidisciplinary work and research program spans the interface between environmental microbiology, geochemistry, and plants. My expertise includes 1) mineral characterization, 2) soil and rhizosphere element cycling, 3) next-generation sequencing and online-controlled bioreactor techniques. Through the integrated application of environmental 'omics approaches, stable isotope analysis and imaging would give new insights into the fundamental element cycling processes of mined land mining wastes, and upon which I could develop novel biotechnology and methodology to prime sustainable mined land management and bioinoculum product with the field validated designated performance.

Dr Zhenjiang You is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Chemical Engineering. He holds a PhD in Fluid Mechanics. He conducts research on mathematical modelling, numerical simulation and experimental study of flows in porous media, and their applications in petroleum/chemical/mechanical/mining/civil engineering, energy, environment and water resources. He develops new theories and models for colloidal/suspension transport in porous media, innovative technologies for enhanced gas/oil production, and applicable tools for reservoir engineering, production engineering and geothermal industry. He has received research funding support from ARC, NERA, DMITRE, ARENA and a range of Australian and international companies. He collaborates with researchers in Australia, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, China, Russia, USA, Brazil and Iran.

His teaching contributions include Reservoir Engineering, Well Test Analysis, Reservoir Simulation, Field Design Project, Mathematical Modelling and Fluid Mechanics for Petroleum Engineers, Formation Damage, Enhanced Oil and Gas Recovery, Unconventional Resources and Recovery, etc.

I have a keen interest in the evolutionary relationships that underpin symbioses, particularly those involved in plant disease. There are countless examples of how diseases have impacted on different crops throughout history, and this is an ongoing issue that deleteriously impacts food security. My research involves developing a better understanding of the epidemiology of plant diseases and pests, and delivering improved diagnostics and field management. Working with collaborators and international experts, my work involves research on a broad range of plants that are affected by bacteria, fungi, oomycetes and viruses. I have a strong interest in the biotic factors that govern soil health and the methods by which we can promote the development of beneficial microbial communities.