
Dr Rohitash Chandra is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the UNSW School of Mathematics and Statistics. Dr Chandra leads a program of research encircling methodologies and applications of artificial intelligence; particularly in areas of Bayesian deep learning, neuro-evolution, climate extremes, geoscientific models, and mineral exploration. Dr Chandra has developed novel methods for machine learning inspired by neural systems and learning behaviour that include transfer and multi-task learning, with the goal of modular deep learning. His current interest is uncertainty quantification and deep learning with applications to language models, vaccine research, and COVID-19.
Dr Chandra has attracted multi-million dollar funding with a leading international interdisciplinary team. He is the Data Theme Lead of the Australian Research Council (ARC ITTC) Training Centre for Data Analytics in Minerals and Resources (2020-2025). Dr Chandra is one of the Chief Investigators of the NHMRC Medical Research Future Fund (2021-2022) project on the use of machine learning for COVID-19 drug repurposing and leads the UNSW’s subcontract in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) funded project (October 2021-2024) on improving COVID-19 models with machine learning.
Apart from science, Dr Chandra takes a lot of interest in literature and humanities and has edited and published poetry collections. His current research explores the use of deep learning-based language models for studying ancient philosophical texts. Dr Chandra is a strong advocate of human rights and diversity and is a UNSW Cultural Diversity Champion (2021-2023).
Prior to joining UNSW, Dr Chandra held Sydney Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2017 - 2019). Prior to this, he has taken roles as Research Fellow in Machine Learning at Rolls Royce @Corp Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Bioinformatics at Victoria University of Wellington (January to June 2012), and Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of the South Pacific (2013- 2015). Dr Chandra is originally from Fiji with a Girmit Indian heritage.
Dr Chandra is an Associate Editor (Topical Editor) for Geoscientific Model Development, Neurocomputing (Elsevier), and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. Dr Chandra is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy (HEA).
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Access research papers: https://github.com/rohitash-chandra/research
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