Professor Lina Yao | UNSW Research

My Expertise

Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Recommender Systems, Internet of Things, Brain Computer Interface, Human Machine Interactions

Fields of Research (FoR)

Reinforcement learning, Deep learning, Data mining and knowledge discovery, Semi- and unsupervised learning, Recommender systems, Stream and sensor data, Neural networks, Data engineering and data science

Biography

Prof. Lina Yao is a Professor and an ARC Future Fellow (Level 3) at UNSW. She is the Senior Member of ACM and IEEE. She is leading the research group, Data Dynamics Lab (D² Lab) founded in 2016. We strive to develop generalizable and explainable data-efficient data mining, machine learning, and deep learning algorithms—as well as design systems and interfaces—to enable novel ways of human-agent interactions, including an improved understanding of challenges such as steerability, self-evolution, and robustness that enhance human-autonomy partnerships. Up-to-date information on her research can be found at - https://www.linayao.com/

Her research area encompasses Few-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Meta-Learning, Neural Processes, Self-supervised Learning, Graph Neural Networks, and their applications in a broad range of fields, including Recommender Systems, Computer Vision, Brain-Computer Interface, Biomedical Image Analysis, Intelligent Transportation Systems, and the Internet of Things. She maintains a strong international research collaborations with world-leading universities such as Stanford University, Tsinghua University, UCSD, TU Wien etc.

She is serving as the Leading Associate Editor for Tsinghua University and Technology (Track of Intelligent Computing), Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (ACM TOSN), Knowledge-based Systems (KNOSYS)， ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (ACM TALLIP), Frontiers in Big Data, ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (ACM TORS), IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence ( TAI ), and Editorial Board for Nature Scientific Reports (Scientific Reports). She has over 200 peer-reviewed publications both in international leading conferences and journals, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, SIGKDD, WWW, SIGIR, ICDM, CVPR, UbiComp, AAAI, IJCAI etc.

Academic Appointments

UNSW

Professor (Nov 2025 – Present)
ARC Future Fellow (Apr 2026 – Present)
Conjoint Professor (Sep 2022 – Oct 2025)
Scientia Fellow (Feb 2020 – Oct 2022)
Postgraduate Coordinator (May 2022 – Sep 2022)
Scientia Associate Professor (Jan 2021 – Sep 2022)
Taste of Research Coordinator (Apr 2020 – Sep 2022)
Acting Associate Head of School (Research) (Nov 2021 – Apr 2022)
Senior Lecturer (Jul 2018 – Dec 2020)
ARC DECRA Fellow (Jan 2016 – Dec 2018)
Lecturer (Jan 2016 – Jul 2018)

CSIRO

Visiting Scientist (Jan 2026 – Present)
Senior Principal Research Scientist (Oct 2022 – Nov 2025)
Science Lead for Translational Machine Learning (Oct 2022 – Nov 2025)

Macquarie University

Honorary Professor (Jan 2023 – Jan 2026)

University of Technology Sydney

Adjunct Professor (Dec 2023 – Dec 2025)

University of Adelaide

Lecturer (Jan 2015 – Dec 2015)
ARC Research Associate (Postdoc) (Jan 2014 – Dec 2014)

My Grants

Australia Category-1 Grants:

ARC Future Fellowship (Level 3), Sole CI, FT250100092 Advancing Steerable LLM-powered Agents for Dynamic Multimodal Interactions, 2026-2029
ARC Research Hub, PI, IH250100007 ARC Research Hub for Next Generation Mining Methods
ARC Discovery Project, PI, DP240101469 Improving Resilience of MCDI for Water Supply in Remote Communities, 2024-2026
ARC Discovery Project, PI, DP240100181 Mitigating the Influence of Social Bots in Heterogeneous Social Networks, 2024-2026
ARC Discovery Project, PI, DP240102349 Toward Human-guided Safe Reinforcement Learning in the Real World, 2024-2026
ARC Discovery Project, Lead CI, Generalisable and Unbiased Dynamic Recommender Systems, 2023-2026
ACARP, Chief Investigator, Risk Based Model for Forecasting Longwall Face Cavity Development, 2022 - 2023
ARC Discovery Project, Lead CI, Robust Preference Inference from Spatial-Temporal Interaction Networks, 2021 - 2023
ARC Linkage Project, Lead CI, Context and Activity Recognition for Personalised Behaviour Recommendation, 2020 - 2022
ARC LIEF, CI, "A Large-Scale Distributed Experimental Facility for the Internet of Things", Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities Project, 2018
ARC DECRA Award, Sole CI, "Effective Recommendation for Web of Things", Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, 2016-2018

Others:

EpiWatch – Artificial Intelligence Early-Warning System for Epidemics, CI, Medical Research Future Fund 2021 - 2022
Machine learning techniques for self-aware computing, Sole CI, Defence Science and Technology Group, 2021 - 2025
Deep learning for objective measure of tinnitus, CI, British Tinnitus Association 2021 - 2024
Exploration of Hierarchy of Learning Models in Relation to Goals, Defence Science and Technology Group, 2020-2023
Long Range/BAA Project, Sole CI, "Context-aware Intent Prediction for Human-Machine Cooperation Improvement", Office of Naval Research (US Department of Navy), 2019 - 2021
Multi-faceted Adaptive Trust Management in Federated/Distributed Data and AI Systems, Lead CI, Collaborative Research Project, Data61, 2019 - 2021

My Qualifications

PhD - University of Adelaide, 2014
Master's Degree - University of Adelaide, 2010
Master's Degree - Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 2007
Bachelor's Degree - Shandong University, China 2002

My Awards

Selected honors and awards:

Listed among the World's Top 2% Scientists in Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing 2026 list compiled by Stanford University for both Single Year and Career
Recognized as Top Main Area Chair, NeurIPS 2026
Listed among Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher 2025
ARC Future Fellowship (Level 3), awarded in July 2025, will commence from 2026.
Listed among the World's Top 2% Scientists in Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing 2025 list compiled by Stanford University for both Single Year and Career
Annual Outstanding Contribution Award for Editorial Board Members of Tsinghua Science and Technology 2024
Listed among 2024 Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers List released in Nov. 2024
Listed among the World's Top 2% Scientists in Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing 2024 list compiled by Stanford University for both Single Year and Career
Outstanding Research Contribution Award (formerly named after Chris Wallace), The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) 2023
Listed among the World's Top 2% Scientists in Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing 2023 list compiled by Stanford University for both Single Year and Career
Listed among the World’ Top 2% Scientists in the 2022 list compiled by Stanford University and published at PLOS in the single year category.
Educational Excellence and Innovation Group Award, UNSW Faculty of Engineering Excellence Awards 2021
Winner of 2021 Australia and New Zealand Women in AI Awards in the category of AI in Cybersecurity, 2021
Listed among the World’ Top 2% Scientists in the 2021 list compiled by Stanford University and published at PLOS in the single year category.
Academic Excellence, UNSW Faculty of Engineering Excellence Awards, 2020
Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Higher Degree Research Supervision in the Emerging Supervisor Category 2020, UNSW
Listed among the World’ Top 2% Scientists in the 2020 list compiled by Stanford University and published at PLOS in the single year category.
Inaugural Vice Chancellor's Women's Research Excellence Award, The University of Adelaide 2015
Dean's Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence, The University of Adelaide 2014
Google PhD Prize, Google 2012

My Research Activities

Journal Editorships

Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM Transactions on Information Systems)
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence) since Jan. 2024
Associate Editor, CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction (CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction) since April 2026
Leading Associate Editor (Intelligent Computing Track), Tsinghua Science and Technology (Tsinghua Science and Technology) since Jan. 2024
Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (ACM TORS) since Sept 2022
Editorial Board, Nature Scientific Reports (Scientific Reports) since Mar.2022
Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), since Feb 2022
Associate Editor, Frontiers in Big Data (Frontiers in Big Data) in Section of Recommender Systems, since March 2021
Associate Editor, Knowledge-based Systems (KBS), since Feb. 2021
Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), since Sept. 2019
Guest Editor, Special Section on Causality Representation Learning in LLMs-Driven Recommender Systems (details) 2024. Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Yongfeng Zhang and Kun Zhang
Guest Editor, Special Issue on Few-shot Learning for Human-machine Interactions (FSL-HMI), Pattern Recognition Letters. Xianzhi Wang, Lina Yao, Yu Zhang, Jordi Solé-Casals 2021
Guest Editor, Special Issue on Recommender System, CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction. Xing Xie, Bin Guo, Lina Yao, Yong Li, Xia Hu, 2019
Guest Editor, special issue on Wearable Sensor Signal Processing for Smart Health, Smart Health Journal (Smart Health), Yuan Zhang, Lina Yao, Fatos Xhafa and Carolina Ruiz. 2017
Editor, Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web, Morgan Kaufmann, Elsevier. 2017
Guest Editor, special issue on Big Data Analytics and the Web, IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), Quan Z. Sheng, Athanasios V. Vasilakos, Qi Yu and Lina Yao. 2016

Selected Invited Talks/Panels

Panelist, “The Verification Gap: Abundant Hypotheses, Scarce Verifiers”, NeurIPS 2026 AI4Science panel
Keynote, “LLM4Good”, workshop on Sustainable and Trustworthy Large Language Models for Personalization of UMAP 2026
Panelist, "AI Research Future Directions", Royal Society of New South Wales Forum 2025
Tutorial, Agentic LLM for Recommender Systems, RecSys 2025
Keynote, "Towards Agentic Recommender Systems", ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience, 2024
Tutorial, "When Mining Healthcare Data Meets AI Ethics", SDM 2023
Keynote, CENet 2022
Roundtable discussion, Information Retrieval and Recommendation, ICDE 2022
Panelist, “Data Mining with Far Fewer Labels: Pretraining, Knowledge and Unsupervised Learning”, ICDM 2021

Grant assessment

Australia Research Council (ARC)
European Research Council (ERC)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Austrian Science Fund (ASF)
Israel Science Foundation (ISF)
Ministry of Education, Singapore
Research Grants Council, Hong Kong
Dutch Research Council

Selected Service Roles

Executive Committee Member, Asia-Pacific Society for Brain-Computer Interfaces, Brain Function Assessment and Neuromodulation
Area Chair, WebConf 2027
Area Chair, ICLR 2027
Resources and Demonstration Track Chair, CIKM 2027
Area Chair, WSDM 2027
Area Chair, AAAI-27
Senior Area Chair, SIGKDD 2027
Area Chair, SIGKDD 2027, AI4Science
Senior Area Chair, SIGKDD 2026
Area Chair, NeurIPS 2026
Area Chair, ACL 2026
Area Chair, SIGIR 2026
Area Chair, SIGKDD 2026, AI4Scienc
Member, 2025 ICDM Paper Awards Committee
Area Chair, ACL 2025
Associate Chair, CIKM 2025
Senior Area Chair, Research Track of 2025 KDD
Area Chair, IJCAI 2025
Senior Area Chair, 2025 ACM Web Conference (WWW'25), Track Chair for the Semantics and Knowledge
Industry Chair, 2025 ACM Web Conference (WWW'25)
Member, 2024 ICDM Awards Committee
Organization Committee, The 20th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking (MSN 2024)
Senior Area Chair, Research Track of 2024 KDD
Senior Area Chair (Track Chair of User Modeling and Recommendation), 2024 Web Conference (WWW'24)
Co-Chair, PhD Symposium, 2024 WISE
Member, CORE Outstanding Research Award Committee since 2023
Member, CORE ranking committee for Machine Learning
Area Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2023
Poster Co-Chair, Mobiquitous 2023
Workshop Co-Chair, ACM CIKM 2023
PC Co-Chair, BDCloud 2022
Steering Committee, CML-IOT Workshop on Continual and Multimodal Learning for Internet of Things, adjunct with Ubicomp
PC Co-Chair, ADMA 2022
PC Co-Chair, ICSOC 2022
Workshop Co-chair, Australasia Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2021) (AI 2021), Sydney, Australia, December 1-3, 2021.
Area Chair, Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2021)
PC Co-Chair for Short Paper Track, The 30th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, (CIKM 2021), Gold Coast, Australia, Nov. 1 -5, 2021.
Local Co-Chairs, Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things Week (CPS Week 2020) (CPS Week), Sydney, Australia, April 21-24, 2020.
Panel Chairs, http://www.acsw.org.au/
Local Co-Chairs, BPM 2018
Demo and Poster Chair & PC Member, 14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous 2017), Melbourne, Australia, November 27 - 30, 2017
PC Co-Chair, The 11th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (IEEE BigDataSE 2017), Sydney, Australia, August 1 - 4, 2017
Publicity Co-chair/PC member, The 14th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (( ICSOC 2016)), Banff, Alberta, Canada, October 10 -13, 2016

My Engagement

TechVouchers Project - Succession Plus Australia, Co-CI, Automatic and Integrative Business Solution for Valuation Data Warehousing, Department of Industry, New South Wales 2020
Cooperative Research Centres Projects, CI, DeepIoT – A New Hybrid Wireless IoT Platform for Underground Mines, 2020 - 2023
TechVouchers Project - iKnow Pty Ltd., Sole CI, Customter-centric Interactive Decision Making System, Department of Industry, New South Wales, 2019
UNSW-Tsinghua University Collaborative Research Fund, CI, "iAgeWell: A Unified Computational Mobile Solution for Personalised Wellness management in Senior Citizens", 2019 -2020
TechVoucher Project, Co-CI, Inkerz Smartpen, Department of Industry, New South Wales, 2019
TechVouchers Project - Raiz Pty Ltd., Sole CI, "Collaborative Deep Learning based Personalized Product Recommendation Model", Department of Industry, New South Wales, 2018
UNSW-Tsinghua University Collaborative Research Fund, Lead CI, "City Pulse: A Unified Computational Framework for Data-driven, People-centric Smarter City Applications", 2018 - 2019