Dr Yang Zhao is a continuing lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, La Trobe University. Before joining CSIT, she was a machine learning research fellow at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, The University of Adelaide. She did her PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Griffith University and jointly with AIML, The University of Adelaide. Her research interests lie broadly in the field of computer vision and deep learning, including but not limited to deep metric learning, (ultra) fine-grained image classification, landmark detection, few-shot learning, medical image learning, and generative 3D modeling. Emergent themes of her interest are AI for agriculture and AI for healthcare, primarily in hyperspectral imaging applications, and AI for digital and computational pathology.

Yang is an active ECR and has been publishing peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), Pattern Recognition (PR), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) and International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM).

Yang is eligible to supervise honors, masters, and doctoral students, and is open to interdisciplinary collaboration.

Awards:

Data Science / AI Pioneer Award 2026 Finalist, Women of Colour in STEM Awards, 2026
APRS Early Career Researcher Award 2024, Australian Pattern Recognition Society (APRS), 2024
SCEMS Early Career Researcher Award 2024, La Trobe University, 2024

Grants:
LIMS-SCEMS kick starter funding scheme, Latrobe University, 30k/2026
SCEMS CaRE and Beyond Scheme Grant, Latrobe University, 2k/2024, 3k/2025

SCEMS Learning and Teaching Grant, Latrobe University, 2k, 2024
Top Publication Incentive Award, Griffith University, 1.2k, 2020/2021/2022

Invited Talk:
Landmark Detection and Medical Applications, DICTA 2024, 27 Nov 2024
Deep Learning for Landmark Detection, La Trobe University, 8 May 2023
Deep Learning for Object Retrieval and Landmark Detection, The University of Melbourne, 17 Nov 2022