
Dr Rohitash Chandra is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the UNSW School of Mathematics and Statistics. He leads a program of research encircling methodologies and applications of artificial intelligence. The methodologies include Bayesian deep learning, neuroevolution, ensemble learning, and data augmentation. The applications include climate extremes, geoscientific models, mineral exploration, biomedicine, and COVID-19 where the focus has been drug selection, infection forecasting, and social media-based language modelling. Dr Chandra has also pioneered the area of language models for studying ancient religious-philosophical texts. Dr Chandra used machine learning and remote sensing for mineral exploration and is currently focusing on critical metals. He has been using machine learning for climate extremes and currently developing a model for decadal forecasts of high-category cyclones.
Dr Chandra 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 has been 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. Apart from science, Dr Chandra takes a lot of interest in literature and humanities and has edited and published poetry collections. 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 a Chancellor's Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2017 - 2019). Prior to this, he has taken roles as a 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 (Nausori) and has a Girmit Indian heritage.
Dr Chandra is on the Editorial Board for Geoscientific Model Development published by the European Geoscience Union (EGU). He also served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and Neurocomputing (2021-2022). Dr. Chandra is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy (HEA). Dr Chandra is the founding director of the Transitional Artificial Intelligence Research Group (t-AI) based at UNSW Sydney. Since 2021, Dr Chandra has been featured in the Stanford's list of World Top 2% scientists. His research publication culture demonstrating leadership is given by the first, last, and corresponding author which makes more than 90% of his publications. Furthermore, 85% journal articles appear in Q1 journals (Citescore and SJR).
We developed a transdisciplinary program of research encircling methodologies and applications of data science. The methodologies include Bayesian deep learning, neuroevolution, ensemble machine learning, and data augmentation. The applications include climate extremes, geoscientific models, mineral exploration, medical diagnosis and bioinformatics, and COVID-19 drug re-purposing, infection forecasting, and social media with language models. Our key strength is in the development of novel deep-learning software frameworks with a focus on uncertainty quantification in decision-making. We pioneered the area of language models for studying ancient religious-philosophical texts.
Available Research Projects
My Research Supervision
PhD research students
Masters and Honours
Completions (PhD)
Completions (Honours thesis)
Completions (Masters by Research)
Recent completions - Masters by Coursework (Minor Thesis)
Research engineer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Research Interns
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
My Teaching
Master of Data Science:
Programming Bootcamp: