Personal profile
Biography
Wray is a Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, after spending 4 years at VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam.
His research interests include theoretical and applied work in document and text analysis, machine learning, and probabilistic methods including:
- discrete non-parametric Bayesian statistics
- latent variables in semi-structured and text analysis
- probabilistic methods for large language modls
- probabilistic interpretations for deep neural networks
- teaching AI literacy
- applications in medical and health infomatics.
He teaches Data analysis for semi-structured data (FIT5212) and formerly taught Introduction to Data Science (FIT5145) and Modelling for data analysis (FIT5197). He was founding director of the Master of Data Science, see the introduction to new students at Youtube.
Find about publications on Google, Semantic Scholar, DBLP, ORCID.
Current activity:
- went to NeurIPS in Vancouver in December 2019, amazing!
- attended ACML 2019 in Nagoya in November 2019 as well as National Sun Yat-Sen University (Taiwan) and Harbin Engineering University (China)
- visited Zhengzhou University (China) September 2019
- visited University of Helsinki (Finland), Bosphorus University (Turkey) December 2018 and Sharif University of Technology (Iran) in January 2019
- attended ACML 2018 in Beijing in November 2018, ECML-PKDD in Dublin in September 2018, PAKDD in Melbourne in June 2018
Service activity:
- editorial board for Knowledge and Information Systems and Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and Frontiers of Computer Science and Behaviormetrika
- area chair for NeurIPS 2020, senior PC for IJCAI2020 and EMNLP 2020, senior PC for AAAI 2019, ACML 2018, IJCAI 2018, UAI 2017, ACML 2017, KDD 2017, IJCAI 2016, KDD 2016 and KDD 2015
- international hiring and grant review panels
Completed students:
- He Zhang: Supervisory panel member for Doctoral Thesis "Probability Estimation for Bayesian
Network Classifiers and Decision Trees" awarded 2020 - Ming Liu: Supervisory panel member for Doctoral Thesis "Weak Supervision and Active
Learning for Deep Neural Models" awarded 2019 - Pooyra Zaremoodi: Supervisory panel member for Doctoral Thesis "Neural Machine Translation for Bilingually Low-Resource Scenarios" awarded 2019
- He Zhao: Supervisory panel member for Doctoral Thesis "Structured Bayesian Latent Factor
Models with Meta-data" awarded 2019 - Novi Quadrianto: ANU. Supervisory panel member for Doctoral Thesis "Learning for the Internet: Kernel Embeddings and Optimisation," awarded 2011.
- Lan Du: ANU. Supervisor for Doctoral Thesis "Non-parametric Bayesian Methods for Structured Topic Models"awarded 2012.
- Changyou Chen: ANU. Supervisor for PhD Thesis "Dependent Normalized Random Measures," from 2011, awarded 2014.
- Aaron Li: ANU. Supervisor for Honours Thesis "Multi-GPU Distributed Parallel Bayesian Differential Topic Modelling," awarded 1st class honours December 2012.
- Kar Wai Lim: ANU. Supervisor for PhD Thesis, started 2012, completed 2016.
- Swapnil Mishra: Supervisor for Master Thesis "Sparse and Hierarchical Topic Modeling." Awarded 1st class honours, July 2014.
Related Links:
- Blog and academic webpage at Bayesian-Models.ORG website
- Google Scholar entry
- DBLP entry (computer science bibliography)
- Research Gate web page
- The 5th Asian Conference on Machine Learning, was co-chair (ACML2013)
- Topic modelling and large scale discrete non-parametric libraries supported at Github (wbuntine)
- W. L. Buntine (1994) "Operations for Learning with Graphical Models" , Volume 2, pages 159-225
Research interests
Theoretical and applied research in document and text analysis, data mining and machine learning, probabilistic methods and information retireval. Main effort is in applying probabilistic and non-parametric Bayesan methods to tasks such as text analysis, topic modelling, language analysis and medical and health informatics.
Education/Academic qualification
Computing Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy, University of Technology (UTS) Sydney
Award Date: 1 May 1991
Computer Science, Graduate Diploma, University of Queensland
Award Date: 3 Dec 1984
Pure and Applied Mathematics, Bachelor of Science, University of Queensland
Award Date: 1 Aug 1979
External positions
Fellow, Helsingin Yliopisto (University of Helsinki)
4 Apr 2007 → …
Research area keywords
- Artificial Intelligence
- Bayesian non-parametrics
- Computational intelligence and neural networks
- Data Analysis
- Data mining
- Text mining
- Machine Learning
- Bayesian Inference
- Bayesian Networks
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being -
SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
Projects
- 15 Finished
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Google travel grant for Unveiling the Potential of Text in High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting
Zhou, X. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Wang, T. (Supervisor), Bergmeir, C. (Supervisor) & Buntine, W. (Supervisor)
Google (United States of America)
8/11/24 → 8/01/25
Project: Research
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Design and carry out validation of a natural language processing (NLP) approach for extracting a feature set from public financial disclosure documentation
Buntine, W. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI))
31/01/22 → 30/04/22
Project: Research
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Providing digital health support for the Virtual Hospital
Tan, C. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Wang, T. (Supervisor), Buntine, W. (Supervisor), Tong, E.Y.-K. (Supervisor), Bingham, G. (Supervisor), Enticott, J. (Project Manager), Teede, H. (Project Manager) & Bain, C. (Project Manager)
2/12/21 → 2/12/24
Project: Research
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Rethinking the Data-driven Discovery of Rare Phenomena
Boley, M. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Buntine, W. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Schmidt, D. (Chief Investigator (CI)), Kuhlmann, L. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Scheffler, M. (Partner Investigator (PI))
29/07/21 → 28/11/24
Project: Research
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Towards an Efficient Medical Surveillance System
Nguyen, D. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Du, L. (Supervisor), Buntine, W. (Supervisor), Srikanth, V. (Supervisor), Buttery, J. (Supervisor), Bain, C. (Project Manager) & Skouteris, H. (Project Manager)
1/02/21 → 31/01/24
Project: Research
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Leveraging Deep AUC Maximisation for Enhanced Active Learning in Named Entity Recognition
Tan, W., Nguyen, D., Li, C., Buntine, W., Zhao, H. & Du, L., 2026, Advanced Data Mining and Applications - 21st International Conference, ADMA 2025, Proceedings. Yoshikawa, M., Meng, X., Cao, Y., Xiao, C., Chen, W. & Wang, Y. (eds.). Singapore Singapore: Springer, p. 287-302 16 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; vol. 16198).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference Paper › Research › peer-review
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Context-driven cold-start Web traffic forecasting
Zhou, X., Wang, W., Buntine, W. & Bergmeir, C., 30 Sept 2025, In: World Wide Web. 28, 6, 24 p., 60.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
Open AccessFile1 Link opens in a new tab Citation (Scopus) -
LLM Reading Tea Leaves: Automatically Evaluating Topic Models with Large Language Models
Yang, X., Zhao, H., Phung, D., Buntine, W. & Du, L., 17 Apr 2025, In: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 13, p. 357-375 19 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
Open AccessFile3 Link opens in a new tab Citations (Scopus) -
Navigating Conflicting Views: Harnessing Trust for Learning
Lu, J., Buntine, W., Qi, Y., Dipnall, J., Gabbe, B. & Du, L., 2025, 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. Yue, Y., Garg, A., Peng, N., Sha, F. & Yu, R. (eds.). Appleton WI USA: International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vol. 267. p. 40411-40435 25 p.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference Paper › Research › peer-review
Open Access -
Bayesian estimate of mean proper scores for diversity-enhanced active learning
Tan, W., Du, L. & Buntine, W., May 2024, In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 46, 5, p. 3463-3479 17 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review
7 Link opens in a new tab Citations (Scopus)
Activities
- 3 Committees and working groups
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Course Director - Master of Data Science - Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Buntine, W. (Chair/ Co-Chair)
1 Jan 2016Activity: External Academic Engagement › Committees and working groups
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Member - Graduate Programs Committee - Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Buntine, W. (Member)
1 Jan 2016Activity: External Academic Engagement › Committees and working groups
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Member - Faculty Research Committee - Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Buntine, W. (Member)
1 Jan 2016Activity: External Academic Engagement › Committees and working groups
Press/Media
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Healthcare efficiency: AI technology to reduce hospital readmissions
Hettige, B., Wang, T., Li, Y.-F. & Buntine, W.
11/05/20
1 item of Media coverage
Press/Media: Article/Feature
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Byte Into It - Discussion Data Science and IA for Social Good - Google Impact Grant
Scott, D. & Buntine, W.
18/03/20
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Profile/Interview