Dr Xiaojun Chang joined UTS as a Professor in the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) in 2022, bringing his globally renowned expertise in artificial intelligence, computer vision, multimedia, neural networks and machine learning. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Vision at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

At AAII, he is the Director of the Recognition, Learning and Reasoning Lab (ReLER) where he explores multiple signals (visual, acoustic, textual) for automatic content analysis in unconstrained or surveillance videos.

Prior to this, Xiaojun received his PhD in Computer Science from UTS in 2016 before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. as a postdoctoral research associate. After being awarded an ARC DECRA in 2018, Xiaojun returned to Australia to take up a lecturer position at Monash University. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020, then joined RMIT University as an Associate Professor in 2021.

With a focus on real-world outcomes, Xiaojun has secured over $3 million in research funding and has made significant contributions to the field of video analysis and multimedia information retrieval, including for health care and management.

Xiaojun was named a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023, and his work has been covered by media from Australia, US, Europe and China, including his ground-breaking work developing an automatic report generation system for critically ill COVID-19 patients using deep learning techniques.

His team has won multiple prizes from international grand challenges, hosting competitive teams from MIT, University of Maryland, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and Baidu VIS. He also won first prize in TrecVID 2019 - Activity Extended Video (ActEV) challenge, held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S.

Xiaojun engages regularly with industry and has published a total of over 200 peer reviewed research papers and top conference papers. He has also served as an area chair for many prestigious international conferences, such as ACM Multimedia 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, IJCAI 2018, and ICPR 2018. Xiaojun has reviewed ARC Discovery Grant applications and served as an Associate Editor and Guest Editor on multiple prestigious journals.

Incredibly passionate about his work, Xiaojun’s ultimate aim is to advance the field of artificial intelligence to better serve humanity by creating more accurate and efficient computational models that can understand and interact with the real world in a meaningful way.