ProfJian Zhang

Jian Zhang is a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at UTS working on cutting-edge research in the areas of 2D and 3D-based computer vision, pattern recognition & data analytics, large-scale image and video content analytics and retrieval, and multimedia and social media signal processing.

As Director of the Multimedia Data Analytics Lab in the Global Big Data Technologies Centre at UTS, Jian built an award-winning, cross-disciplinary UTS research and engineering team, uniquely focusing on computer vision research for the Agri-food sector. He led the establishment of a solid UTS project pipeline, from his lab research to technology development and commercialisation pathway. These projects are funded by Australian Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs) including Meat & Livestock Australia/LiveCorp and Australian Eggs.

Jian has published more than 240 peer-reviewed papers (h-index 52, and over 9798 citations on Google Scholar) and holds 11 approved US patents. His research has been widely cited by related research communities and he has been invited to give keynote addresses and talks at numerous international conferences. As a principal supervisor, he has also enriched the experience of five research fellows and had 22 graduated PhD students including 17 from UTS. 

Jian has led the team to regularly partner with industry to undertake R&D programs to improve efficiency and productivity across a range of sectors. His recent projects for the Agri-food sector include developing artificial intelligence and video analysis to detect, segment and track livestock movements in a range of applications for fast and accurate counting of export vessel loading and saleyards trade; designing a fish quality assessment system in Sydney Fish Market, and collaborating with Australian Eggs to develop video-based AI technology to alert and protect smothering from pile-up and flock movement in chicken farms.

Since 2011, working with industry partners, he has led more than 20 research projects worth more than $5 million.

From 2004 to 2011, Jian was a Principal Researcher and Project Leader at Data61 (formerly NICTA) Australia and a Conjoint Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW.

He led three large NICTA research projects in the areas of computer vision, pattern recognition, and video surveillance content analytics.

From 1997 to 2003, Jian worked at the Visual Information Processing Laboratory at Motorola Australian Research Centre as a Principal Research Engineer and Research Manager of Visual Communications team. While there, he worked on a range of research projects including image processing, video coding and communication, image segmentation, and multimedia content adaptation.

Jian earned his PhD from the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of NSW in 1999.