Congratulations to Professor Wenjie Zhang for receiving the ARC Future Fellowship

Professor Wenjie Zhang from the School of Computer Science and Engineering has been awarded more than $1M by ARC through the Future Fellowship scheme to investigate the efficient processing of big, dynamic heterogeneous graphs.

Heterogeneous graphs model emerging novel applications such as infectious disease spread networks, e-commerce transaction networks, traffic road networks, social networks, drug discovery networks, etc., and serve as a powerful model to precisely and flexibly capture all dynamically evolving information in these applications. The size of real-world networks tends to be very large. For instance, if we look at the COVID-19 contact tracing in NSW, the people-location network that models people's spatial-temporal co-location may involve millions of check-ins each day and is highly dynamic. It becomes a true challenge to identify close contact in a real-time manner (e.g., in milliseconds). Similar problems include real-time monitoring of fraudulent transactions in e-commerce networks, anomaly detection in infrastructure networks, bushfire alarm in sensor networks, etc.  

Professor Zhang's research interests lie in accelerating data-intensive applications by developing efficient (e.g., real-time) and scalable (e.g., billion-scale data) techniques. She is interested in unlocking the values from various data types such as streaming, spatial-temporal, high-dimensional, uncertain, and graph/network data. She is currently a professor working in the Data and Knowledge Research Group in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). The research conducted in the Data and Knowledge Research Group is highly recognized worldwide and has won numerous awards, including the prestigious ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award in 2021 and CORE Chris Wallace Research Award 2019. CSE is home to many world-leading researchers in the mainstream areas in computer science such as databases, AI, ML, HCI, networks, trustworthy systems, computer theories, and computer vision. "CSE provides an excellent research environment which is essential to the success of the grant applications," Professor Zhang said.

If you are interested in joining this exciting project, you can contact Professor Zhang. "We are always recruiting motivated Ph.D. and research master students in the area of real-time big data analytics for today's intelligent applications. We also welcome collaborations to develop real-time and intelligent techniques for various data-intensive applications. "She added.

More information about Professor Zhang and her research activity can be found here.