Longbing Cao

Prof Cao is the Distinguished Chair in AI and an ARC Future Fellow (Level 3) at Macquarie. He was the Founding Director of the UTS Advanced Analytics Institute and had been a full professor at UTS since 2009. He holds PhDs in AI and computing science, Msc in communication, and bachelor in electrical engineering.

Prof Cao is a pioneering researcher in AI, data science, and advanced analytics. His research efforts have focused on fundamentals and innovations for AI and intelligent systems, pattern recognition, data science and analytics, shallow-to-deep machine learning, behaviour, business an social informatics, and applied statistics. Since 2005, he has made over 400 publications, including a large number of sole/first-authored monographs and articles.

His research leadership and socioecomic benefits have been recognized by an individual Eureka Prize, ACM Distinguished Scientist, and impact cases mentioned in media, and government and OECD reports.

Founding Director of the UTS Advanced Analytics Institute, the first data science initiative in Australia, Prof Cao has been promoting data science and analytics research, education and development for decades in both academia and industry. He established world-first research degrees at UTS (Master of Analytics (Research) and PhD Thesis: Analytics). In 2009, he established an annual Big Data Summit, the first such forum in Australia, which provided a platform for bridging the gap between academia, industry, and government.

With a CTO experience, enterprise innovation has been his focus for actionable enterprise AI and data science. His high-quality original research has helped solve real-world industry problems, improved business productivity and delivered significant socio-economic benefits. He and his team of researchers have collaborated with government and business organizations in Australia and overseas in a range of fields, including government services, finance, insurance, banking, telecommunications, transport and e-commerce. 

Prof Cao has served as the lead general chair of KDD2015, the first edition in Australia. His many initiatives include, in 2013, founding the IEEE Task Force on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, the IEEE Task Force on Behavior, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing (BESC), and the ACM SIGKDD Australia-New Zealand Chapter. He is/was the Founding Editor in Chief of Int. J. of Data Science and Analytics (JDSA, Springer-Nature), the series editor of the Book Series on Data Analytics (Springer), the Associate EiC and EiC of IEEE Intelligent Systems, the oldest AI magazine in IEEE, the Steering Committee Chairs of PAKDD and DSAA.

AI and intelligent systems

Applied statistics and modeling

Behavior, business and social informatics

Data science and analytics

Shallow to deep machine learning

Enterprise innovation and application

With the CTO experience, Prof Cao committed to enterprise innovation and applications involving domains including public sector/services, capital markets, banking, insurance, health, telcom, e-commerce, transport, smart cities, and education, etc. Prof Cao intensively collaborated with various large private and public organizations, such as Australian Taxation Office, Australian Department of Human Services/Centrelink, Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, IP Australia, Commonwealth Bank Australia, Westpac, AMP, IAG, HCF, SAS, Microsoft, Shanghai Stock Exchange, etc. 

Prof Cao initiated and chaired various ACM and IEEE chapters and task forces, served as editor-in-chiefs and associated editors of major journals and magazines, chaired major conferences including KDD. He is the Steering Committee Chair of PAKDD and IEEE DSAA.