Professor Zhiyong Wang
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Professor Zhiyong Wang

Professor
Deputy Director of Sydney Informatics Hub
Director of Multimedia Computing Laboratory
Phone
+61 2 9351 3766
Professor Zhiyong Wang

Zhiyong Wang is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and the Director of Multimedia Computing Laboratory. His research on multimedia computing is at the intersection of information retrieval, computing vision, computer graphics, and AI (Artificial Intelligence). His research interests focus on multimedia information retrieval, multimedia content understanding (e.g., human action recognition), and multimedia content creation, human-centred multimedia computing, remote sensing, and inter-disciplinary applications in various domains such as agriculture, earth observation, environment, health, and medicine. His research outcomes have been widely published in top conferences and journals and resulted in practical impact in real world applications. He received both a B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in electronic engineering from the South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, and a Ph.D. degree from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He was the President of Australia Pattern Recognition Soceity (APRS) and is a member of IEEE.

Most of us take the ability to see, hear, and create for granted, but these are very challenging things to enable a computer to do. The dual focuses of Professor Zhiyong Wang's research are to enable computers to 'understand' multimedia data in the way humans can, and to help people better create multimedia content. In this way he is working to improve applications in fields as diverse as multimedia information retrieval, computer vision, computer graphics and animation, multimedia analytics, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, medical diagnosis, and healthcare.

"Multimedia computing is a fascinating field with a broad range of applications. We capture the very moments of our daily life in photos and videos, doctors use various medical images to make diagnoses, and astronomers use images of the sky to study the universe. Without multimedia computing techniques, all this would be impossible.

"Such technology allows us to create content such as computer animations, special effects and 3D movies, digital human, and metaverse much more easily and creatively than traditional approaches.

"One of the aims of my research is to enable computers to 'understand' multimedia data. This will mean, for example, that they will be able to ascertain how people are behaving physically (from action recognition) and emotionally (from facial expression recognition). This will allow better video analytics, disease identification, multimedia-enabled training and monitoring, and computer graphics and animation.

"Being with the University of Sydney has provided me a great platform to pursue my research interests, and allowed me to closely link my research with a variety of disciplines. It has been my greatest pleasure to work with the intellectually inspiring students."

COMP5216 - Mobile Compputing

COMP5405 - Digital Media Computing

COMP5425 - Multimedia Retrieval

Project titleResearch student
Decentralized Trust in Crowdsourced Drone ServicesJunaid AKRAM
Soil moisture forecasting in dryland agricultureMuqeet AMIR
Data-Driven Clothes Simulation for 3D AvatarsAdam LIU
point cloud based 3D reconstructionJeffrey LU
Towards a Universal Motion Format for Applicable Data-driven Human Motion ModellingClinton MO
Development of clinically-available biomechanical risk factors for knee osteoarthritisHal SHEN
Crop Mapping with Multi-modal Sequential Remote Sensing ImagesPenghui WEN
Towards Explainable Online Continual LearningHang YU

Publications

Selected Grants

2024

  • High Quality-of-Experience Real-time Video for Smart Online Shopping, Bao W, Wang Z, Wang Z, Zhou B, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Linkage Projects (LP)

2021

  • AI-powered mobile app for diagnosis of eye diseases in cattle, Khatkar M, Dhand N, Govendir M, Wang Z, Meat and Livestock Australia Ltd/Research and Development Grant