Research Fellow (Artificial Intelligence), The University of Auckland.
Expert panelist on AI and healthcare with the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, New Zealand.
About Me
I am a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of Auckland. My current research focuses on bias in language models and developing an understanding of the area. This research has provided me with the backbone of knowledge in limitations, especially with the bias-related research impact on the NZ population. I have several publications on tackling bias in high-impact venues such as IJCAI and ICLR. I have extensive experience working on multi-disciplinary projects with academic and community impact in artificial intelligence and healthcare. I gained my PhD in domain-specific language models for multi-label classification of medical text at the University of Waikato under the supervision of Professor Bernhard Pfahringer. I then worked as a Post-Doc under the mentorship of Prof Michael Witbrock (Oct 2021-Dec 2022) in AI. Since January 2023, I have been working under the mentorship of Prof Gill Dobbie on tackling bias in large language models.
Throughout my PhD and post-PhD, I have published several papers at the intersection of AI and healthcare, including those that directly impacted NZ society. I have also won best-paper awards for such publications. I am also interested in researching the preservation of low-resource languages in the era of technology. My research outputs published in CORE-ranking A conferences, NAACL and AACL-IJCNLP, use deep learning models for language detection and code-switching in bilingual settings, including English-Māori language pairs.
Additionally, I have almost a decade of experience working in the NZ healthcare sector and several years of teaching tertiary students in NZ.
I am also a selected expert panellist on AI and healthcare with the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor.
News
Dec 2023 I have been awarded the University of Auckland Faculty of Science Near Miss Grant ($5,000).
Nov 2023 "Emotion Recognition ToolKit (ERTK): Standardising Tools For Emotion Recognition Research. " Best Open-Source Award, ACM Multimedia 2023 conference in Ottawa, Canada (CORE A*). (PhD student/Lead author Aaron Keesing)
Nov 2023 I have been awarded the University of Auckland Faculty of Science Strategic Research Development Funding towards our research on "Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models". (with Prof Gill Dobbie). ($100,000)
Sep 2023 Invited Guest Presenter at The Australian and New Zealand Society of Occupational Medicine Conference, Wellington, New Zealand.
Aug 2023 Attended IJCAI International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Macau, China. Chaired a session and a panel, EthAIcs@IJCAI, and presented two papers: (i) Challenges in Annotating Datasets to Quantify Bias in Under-represented Society. & (ii) Developing a Fair AI-based Healthcare Framework with a Feedback Loop.
June 2023 Selected as an expert panellist on AI and healthcare, with the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor New Zealand.
May 2023 An interview with Radio New Zealand on ChatGPT and healthcare. (Interview link)
Research Areas
Machine learning
Natural language processing
Health informatics
Low resource languages
Health Equity
AI and Bias
AI for Good