Dr Long was appointed as an Associate Professor in January 2021 and currently holds a research-intensive continuing appointment (0.8 FTE research, 0.2 FTE service) at the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII), School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and IT, UTS. My research focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), spanning both foundational theory and real-world applications. His current research interest focuses on using federated learning to develop a trustworthy AI with privacy-preserving and personalised intelligence, and also developing new on-device intelligence to cooperate with pre-trained foundation models at the server, e,g, large language models. More details could be found on the Tab page of "Research Interests".  

He is currently leading a research group, namely the foundation model and federated learning (https://www.fmfl.group/). He and his PhD students have published papers at top AI conferences, including ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, and WWW. His publications have attracted 10,000 citations in the one-year time of 2025. By 2025, he had 20 papers received more than 200 citations. 

Dr Long has demonstrated research impact on the real industry. His research interests focus on several application domains, such as NLP, Healthcare, IoT, Education, and Social Media. He has received more than $4m in external investment from the industry. In collaboration with the industry, Dr Long and his team can use their expertise to solve real problems leading to the innovative application of the industry sector, and also can reshape their research vision with inspiration from the industry. Dr Long and his collaborators have created a small research ecosystem to pave the knowledge transition among theoretical research, applied research, and real applications.

Dr Long is actively engaged with the research communities. He is serving as the general co-chair to organise the WebConf to be hosted in Sydney in May 2025. He is a regular assessor for more than ARC (Australia Research Council) proposals including DP, LP, DECRA and Future Fellow. He has served as program co-chair to organise the Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2021. He has also served as a reviewer for a few top AI conferences, e.g. NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ICDM, ACL, NAACL, and CIKM. He was the Job Match Chair for KDD 2015 and IJCAI 2017. The Job Match program aims to provide a face-to-face recruitment opportunity for conference attendees and sponsors. He also served as the program co-chair for the 17th International Conference on ADMA 2021.

Dr Long is always seeking talented and self-supervised PhD candidates. If you are interested in working with him for several years, please send your CV to his email. For research visitors, Dr Long prefers to receive long-term visits over a one-year period at least.