Academic Staff

Professor Zhang obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Fudan University, China in 1982. He further received his Master of Science degree from Jilin University, China in 1985, Doctor of Philosophy degree from The University of Queensland, Australia in 1991 and Doctor of Science degree (Higher Doctorate) from Deakin University, Australia in 2002, all in Artificial Intelligence research field.    Professor Zhang started his academic career as a Lecturer in the University of New England, Australia in 1990 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in 1994 and 1998 respectively.  He worked as Associate Professor at Deakin University from 1999 to 2001, and then moved to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) as Research Professor in 2001.  In 2008, he had been appointed as the founding Director of the UTS Priority Research Centre for Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems (QCIS) till 2017.  Since 2017, he has been appointed Distinguished Professor in Artificial Intelligence.  During his appointment in UTS, he also served as Executive Director of UTS Data Science (January – November 2017), Associate Vice President (Research Relationships China) (December 2017 – November 2021) and Pro Vice-Chancellor (China Enterprise) since December 2021.  Then he moved to Hong Kong Polytechnic University on 10 September 2024.

Professor Zhang’s research interests focus on Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining.  Professor Zhang has 384 publications with citations about 34,000 and an h-index of 71 (Google Scholar) on 6 September 2024.  Most of his papers have been published in prestigious international journals, such as Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions and ACM Transactions.  With his outstanding research performance, he won the NSW Science and Engineering Award in 2011, UTS Vice Chancellor Research Excellence award (Leadership) in 2011, and IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award in 2021.  

Professor Zhang has been invited to serve the key roles of various professional bodies including  Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (since 2009) , Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society (since 1995), College of Experts in the Australian Research Council (2012 – 2014), founding Chair of Steering Committee of International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (2006 – 2014), Chairman of the Australian Computer Society National Committee for Artificial Intelligence (since 2005), Chair of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics (2014 – 2018), Conference Chair of ICDM-2010, KDD-2015, and International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2024), etc.