Prof. Saman K. Halgamuge

IEEE Fellow

Prof Saman Halgamuge, Fellow of IEEE, IET, AAIA and NASSL is a Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne. Previously, he was a member of the Australian Research Council grant assessment panel and the Head of Engineering School at Australian National University. He obtained the Dipl.-Ing and Ph.D. degrees in data engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He is listed as a top 2% most cited researcher for AIand Image Processing in the Stanford database. He is a distinguished visitor appointed by the IEEE Computer Society (2025-27) and was a distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2018-21). His research is funded by Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, US DoD Biomedical Research program and international industry (e.g. Bosch Germany, Google US). In China, he held visiting appointments at Tong Ji and Hebei universities. Currently he is a visiting professor of SLIIT, UM, UTP and ITB.

Abstract: As the major disruptive technology today, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is the focus of our research group at University of Melbourne, is transforming every sector and therefore every workplace including teaching and learning. The transformation power of AI was not very apparent until the OpenAI released its now famous tool Chat GPT. However, AI encompasses lot more than ChatGPT.

In my talk I will introduce and explore the key branches of Machine Learning, summarising the ideas behind other landmark innovations that changed the world (and still changing) in the last 20 years: Convolutional Neural Network and the clever idea of “attention” used in image processing, Transformers that utilised the same clever idea of “attention” giving rise to Large Language models, Physics Informed Neural Networks and its use in Sciences, Graph Neural Networks and how it can incorporate lateral features. New research work in all these areas at our research group including several applications will be presented. 

Title: Advancements in AI: Changing the Scientific Landscape and Education.