Prof Ivor Tsang

Professor Ivor W. Tsang has served as Director of the A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (A*STAR CFAR) since January 2022. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Previously, he was Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Research Director of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII), Australia’s largest artificial intelligence institute.

Professor Tsang works at the forefront of artificial intelligence and big data analytics. His research interests include transfer learning, deep generative models, learning with weak supervision, and the analysis of data with extremely high-dimensional feature, sample, and label spaces. His work has gained international recognition for its significant contributions to these fields.

In 2013, Professor Tsang was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in recognition of his outstanding research in big data analytics and large-scale machine learning. In 2019, his paper, “Towards Ultrahigh Dimensional Feature Selection for Big Data,” published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research, received the International Consortium of Chinese Mathematicians Best Paper Award. In 2020, he was named an AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar in the AAAI/IJCAI category for his contributions to the field between 2009 and 2019, ranking as the leading scholar in Australia in that category.

His research on transfer learning received the Best Student Paper Award at CVPR 2010 and the 2014 IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award. His work on learning with noisy labels was recognised with the NeurIPS 2018 Most Influential Paper Award, while his research on explainable deep clustering received the CPAL 2024 Best Paper Award. He also received the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award in 2007 for his innovative work on solving the inverse problem of nonlinear representations, originally published in 2004.

Professor Tsang was elevated to IEEE Fellow for his outstanding contributions to large-scale machine learning and transfer learning.

Since 2024, Professor Tsang has led Singapore’s national initiative on Trustworthy Foundation Models under the National Multimodal Large Language Model Programme, helping to shape the country’s strategic direction in artificial intelligence. He also leads research on trustworthy agentic workflows and agentic debuggers and oversees major national initiatives, including the AI Singapore Materials Design Grand Challenge and the Maritime AI Programme.

Professor Tsang holds prominent editorial and conference leadership positions. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief for the Machine Learning track of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and regularly serves as a Senior Area Chair or Area Chair for leading international conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and IJCAI.

Contact: ivor_tsang@a-star.edu.sg