
Rohitash Chandra- PhD in Artificial Intelligence
- Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney
Rohitash Chandra
- PhD in Artificial Intelligence
- Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney
Research in Bayesian deep learning, language models, and applications @UNSW Sydney
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222
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Introduction
Dr. Chandra has a built a program of research encircling methodologies and applications of artificial intelligence; particularly in areas of deep learning, neuro-evolution, Bayesian methods, climate extremes, landscape evolution models, reef modelling and mineral exploration. https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-rohitash-chandra
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Education
March 2009 - February 2012
February 2007 - April 2008
Publications
Publications (222)
Porphyry copper (Cu) systems occur along magmatic belts derived in subduction zones. Our current understanding of their formation is restricted to observations from the overriding plate, resulting in a knowledge gap in terms of processes occurring in convergence zones through time. An association between key tectonic processes and the timing and lo...
Social scientists and psychologists take interest in understanding how people express emotions and sentiments when dealing with catastrophic events such as natural disasters, political unrest, and terrorism. The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophic event that has raised a number of psychological issues such as depression given abrupt social changes...
The decline of the number of newly discovered mineral deposits and increase in demand for different minerals in recent years has led exploration geologists to look for more efficient and innovative methods for processing different data types at each stage of mineral exploration. As a primary step, various features, such as lithological units, alter...
It is well known that translations of songs and poems not only break rhythm and rhyming patterns, but can also result in loss of semantic information. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Hindu philosophical text originally written in Sanskrit that features a conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna prior to the Mahabharata war. The Bhagavad Gita is...
Traditional geological mapping methods, which rely on field observations and rock sample analysis, are inefficient for continuous spatial mapping of geological features such as alteration zones. Deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have ushered in a transformative era in remote sensing data analysis. CNNs excel in autom...
Recommender systems leveraging deep learning models have been crucial for assisting users in selecting items aligned with their preferences and interests. However, a significant challenge persists in single-criteria recommender systems, which often overlook the diverse attributes of items that have been addressed by Multi-Criteria Recommender Syste...
Traditional geological mapping, based on field observations and rock sample analysis, is inefficient for continuous spatial mapping of features like alteration zones. Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have revolutionised remote sensing data analysis by automatically extracting features for classification and regres...
The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is important to understand the long-term nature of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple di...
Bluebottles (\textit{Physalia} spp.) are marine stingers resembling jellyfish, whose presence on Australian beaches poses a significant public risk due to their venomous nature. Understanding the environmental factors driving bluebottles ashore is crucial for mitigating their impact, and machine learning tools are to date relatively unexplored. We...
Over the past decades, there has been an increasing concern about the prevalence of abusive and violent content in Hollywood movies. This study uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the longitudinal abuse and sentiment analysis of Hollywood Oscar and blockbuster movie dialogues from 1950 to 2024. By employing fine-tuned LLMs, we analyze subt...
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer robust uncertainty quantification in model predictions, but training them presents a significant computational challenge. This is mainly due to the problem of sampling multimodal posterior distributions using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and variational inference algorithms. Moreover, the number of...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, community tensions intensified, fuelling Hinduphobic sentiments and discrimination against individuals of Hindu descent within India and worldwide. Large language models (LLMs) have become prominent in natural language processing (NLP) tasks and social media analysis, enabling longitudinal studies of platforms like X (...
Anti-vaccine sentiments have been well-known and reported throughout the history of viral outbreaks and vaccination programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic caused fear and uncertainty about vaccines, which has been well expressed on social media platforms such as Twitter (X). We analyse sentiments from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and study the...
Uncertainty quantification is crucial in time series prediction, and quantile regression offers a valuable mechanism for uncertainty quantification which is useful for extreme value forecasting. Although deep learning models have been prominent in multi-step ahead prediction, the development and evaluation of quantile deep learning models have been...
Medical time series datasets feature missing values that need data imputation methods, however, conventional machine learning models fall short due to a lack of uncertainty quantification in predictions. Among these models, the CATSI (Context-Aware Time Series Imputation) stands out for its effectiveness by incorporating a context vector into the i...
Machine translation using large language models (LLMs) is having a significant global impact, making communication easier. Mandarin Chinese is the official language used for communication by the government, education institutes, and media in China. In this study, we provide an automated assessment of machine translation models with human experts us...
Understanding and preserving the deep sea ecosystems is paramount for marine conservation efforts. Automated object (deep-sea biota) classification can enable the creation of detailed habitat maps that not only aid in biodiversity assessments but also provide essential data to evaluate ecosystem health and resilience. Having a significant source of...
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated xenophobia, particularly Sinophobia, leading to widespread discrimination against individuals of Chinese descent. Large language models (LLMs) are pre-trained deep learning models used for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The ability of LLMs to understand and generate human-like text makes them particul...
In recent years, climate extremes such as floods have created significant environmental and economic hazards for Australia, causing damage to the environment and economy and losses of human and animal lives. An efficient method of forecasting floods is crucial to limit this damage. Techniques for flood prediction are currently based on hydrological...
Supervised machine learning methods for geological mapping via remote sensing face limitations due to the scarcity of accurately labelled training data that can be addressed by unsupervised learning, such as dimensionality reduction and clustering. Dimensionality reduction methods have the potential to play a crucial role in improving the accuracy...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the news media coverage encompassed a wide range of topics that includes viral transmission, allocation of medical resources, and government response measures. There have been studies on sentiment analysis of social media platforms during COVID-19 to understand the public response given the rise of cases and government...
There has been much interest in accurate cryptocurrency price forecast models by investors and researchers. Deep Learning models are prominent machine learning techniques that have transformed various fields and have shown potential for finance and economics. Although various deep learning models have been explored for cryptocurrency price forecast...
Geological mapping faces challenges with traditional methods, prompting the exploration of streamlined approaches. This study employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on Landsat 8, Landsat 9, and ASTER data for mapping alteration zones in Broken Hill, a mineral-rich region in the west of New South Wales, Australia. CNNs, adept at extracting fea...
Quantum computing has opened up various opportunities for the enhancement of computational power in the coming decades. We can design algorithms inspired by the principles of quantum computing, without implementing in quantum computing infrastructure. In this paper, we present the quantum predator–prey algorithm (QPPA), which fuses the fundamentals...
The challenge to automatically design machine learning-based models for datasets with varying dimensions (features) remains open, especially in the context of unstructured and noisy data. Bayesian neural networks employ Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference methods for training (sampling) model parameters. However, the progress...
I envision a world where we are fearless in bringing science and religion (spirituality) together. Hinduism is built on the philosophical foundations of the search for the truth and shares this vision with modern science. However, the focus of Hinduism has largely been on investigating the nature of consciousness. Several universities in the West h...
Bayesian inference provides a methodology for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in machine learning and deep learning methods. Variational inference and Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are used to implement Bayesian inference. In the past three decades, MCMC sampling methods have faced some challenges in being ada...
The use of metaphors and associated literary devices have been central to the composition of ancient religious and philosophical texts. These devices help in portraying spiritual messages where the use of simple and common references to objects and situations has deep symbolic meaning. However, the structural and contextual complexity of religious...
The gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used indicator in macroeconomics and the main tool for measuring a country’s economic output. Due to the diversity and complexity of the world economy, a wide range of models have been used, but there are challenges in making decadal GDP forecasts given unexpected changes such as pandemics and war...
Evolutionary algorithms provide gradient-free optimisation which is beneficial for models that have difficulty in obtaining gradients; for instance, geoscientific landscape evolution models. However, such models are at times computationally expensive and even distributed swarm-based optimisation with parallel computing struggle. We can incorporate...
Topic modelling with innovative deep learning methods has gained interest for a wide range of applications that includes COVID-19. It can provide, psychological, social and cultural insights for understanding human behaviour in extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we use prominent deep learning-based language models for COVI...
Environmental damage has been of much concern, particularly in coastal areas and the oceans, given climate change and the drastic effects of pollution and extreme climate events. Our present-day analytical capabilities, along with advancements in information acquisition techniques such as remote sensing, can be utilised for the management and study...
Drug repurposing (or repositioning) is the process of finding new therapeutic uses for drugs already approved by drug regulatory authorities (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)) for other diseases. This involves analyzing the interactions between different biological entities, such as drug target...
Anti-vaccine sentiments have been well-known and reported throughout the history of viral outbreaks and vaccination programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic had fear and uncertainty about vaccines which has been well expressed on social media platforms such as Twitter. We analyse Twitter sentiments from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and study the...
Due to the high mutation rate of the virus, the COVID-19 pandemic evolved rapidly. Certain variants of the virus, such as Delta and Omicron emerged with altered viral properties leading to severe transmission and death rates. These variants burdened the medical systems worldwide with a major impact to travel, productivity, and the world economy. Un...
Knowing which factors are significant in credit rating assignment leads to better decision-making. However, the focus of the literature thus far has been mostly on structured data, and fewer studies have addressed unstructured or multi-modal datasets. In this paper, we present an analysis of the most effective architectures for the fusion of deep l...
Class imbalance (CI) in classification problems arises when the number of observations belonging to one class is lower than the other classes. Ensemble learning that combines multiple models to obtain a robust model has been prominently used with data augmentation methods to address class imbalance problems. In the last decade, a number of strategi...
Bayesian inference provides a methodology for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in machine learning and deep learning methods. Variational inference and Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling techniques are used to implement Bayesian inference. In the past three decades, MCMC methods have faced a number of challenges in being ad...
The University of the South Pacific (USP) has suffered in the past due to mismanagement and political interference. Currently, the new Fijian government is trying to correct the past mistakes by the previous government and release leftover grants. Although this is a good way ahead, I think the government must release any grants with caution due to...
Topic modelling with innovative deep learning methods has gained interest for a wide range of applications that includes COVID-19. Topic modelling can provide, psychological, social and cultural insights for understanding human behaviour in extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we use prominent deep learning-based language mo...
Google Translate has been prominent for language translation; however, limited work has been done in evaluating the quality of translation when compared to human experts. Sanskrit one of the oldest written languages in the world. In 2022, the Sanskrit language was added to the Google Translate engine. Sanskrit is known as the mother of languages su...
Background and objectives:
The use of machine learning methods for modelling bio-systems is becoming prominent which can further improve bio-medical technologies. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) can embed the knowledge of physical laws that govern a system during the model training process. PINNs utilise differential equations in the mode...
Environmental damage has been of much concern, particularly coastal areas and the oceans given climate change and drastic effects of pollution and extreme climate events. Our present day analytical capabilities along with the advancements in information acquisition techniques such as remote sensing can be utilized for the management and study of co...
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used indicator in macroeconomics and the main tool for measuring a country's economic ouput. Due to the diversity and complexity of the world economy, a wide range of models have been used, but there are challenges in making decadal GDP forecasts given unexpected changes such as pandemics and wars. De...
Coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse and economically valuable ecosystems on Earth, but they are threatened by climate change. Understanding how reefs developed over geological timescales can provide important information about past environmental changes and their impacts on reef systems. Significant effort and capital have been inve...
Although various vaccines are now commercially available, they have not been able to stop the spread of COVID-19 infection completely. An excellent strategy to get safe, effective, and affordable COVID-19 treatments quickly is to repurpose drugs that are already approved for other diseases. The process of developing an accurate and standardized dru...
Although various vaccines are now commercially available, they have not been able to stop the spread of COVID-19 infection completely. An excellent strategy to quickly get safe, effective, and affordable COVID-19 treatment is to repurpose drugs that are already approved for other diseases as adjuvants along with the ongoing vaccine regime. The proc...
The Upanishads are known as one of the oldest philosophical texts in the world that form the foundation of Hindu philosophy. The Bhagavad Gita is the core text of Hindu philosophy and is known as a text that summarises the key philosophies of the Upanishads with a major focus on the philosophy of karma. These texts have been translated into many la...
Ensemble learning has gained success in machine learning with major advantages over other learning methods. Bagging is a prominent ensemble learning method that creates subgroups of data, known as bags, that are trained by individual machine learning methods such as decision trees. Random forest is a prominent example of bagging with additional fea...
Due to the rapid evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus, a number of mutations emerged with variants such as Alpha, Gamma, Delta and Omicron which created massive impact to the world economy. Unsupervised machine learning methods have the ability to compresses, characterize and visualises unlabelled data. In this paper, we present a framework...
Ensemble learning has gained success in machine learning with major advantages over other learning methods. Bagging is a prominent ensemble learning method that creates subgroups of data, known as bags, that are trained by individual machine learning methods such as decision trees. Random forest is a prominent example of bagging with additional fea...
The major challenge of Bayesian neural networks has been in developing effective sampling methods that address deep neural networks and big data-related problems. As an alternative to gradient-based training methods, neuro-evolution features evolutionary algorithms that provide a black-box approach to learning in neural networks. Neuroevolution emp...
A distinct feature of Hindu religious and philosophical text is that they come from a library of texts rather than single source. The Upanishads is known as one of the oldest philosophical texts in the world that forms the foundation of Hindu philosophy. The Bhagavad Gita is core text of Hindu philosophy and is known as a text that summarises the k...
In the past decade, deep learning models have been applied to bio-sensors used in a body sensor network for prediction. Given recent innovations in this field, the prediction accuracy of novel models needs to be evaluated for bio-signals. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of deep learning models for respiratory rate prediction. We consider...
The resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is an NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem. The objective of RCPSP is to schedule a set of activities without violating any activity precedence or resource constraints. In recent years researchers have moved away from complex solution methodologies, such as meta heuristics and exact...
Hydrological extremes occupy a large spatial extent, with a temporal sequence, both of which can be influenced by a range of climatological and geographical phenomena. Understanding the key information in the spatial and temporal domain is essential to make accurate forecasts. The capabilities of deep learning methods can be applied in such instanc...
Geochemical data are among the critical data types used at different stages of mineral exploration to identify ore deposits and mineralization processes. Mapping geochemical anomalies related to target mineralization and integrating them with other data types are essential for determining potentially mineralized zones. In the past decades, a variet...
Lithological mapping is a critical aspect of geological mapping that can be useful in studying the mineralization potential of a region and has implications for mineral prospectivity mapping. This is a challenging task if performed manually, particularly in highly remote areas that require a large number of participants and resources. The combinati...
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have major impact to health and medical infrastructure, economy, and agriculture. Prominent computational and mathematical models have been unreliable due to the complexity of the spread of infections. Moreover, lack of data collection and reporting makes modelling attempts difficult and unreliable. Hence, we need...
Advances in parallel and distributed computing have enabled efficient implementation of the distributed swarm and evolutionary algorithms for complex and computationally expensive models. Evolutionary algorithms provide gradient-free optimisation which is beneficial for models that do not have such information available, for instance, geoscientific...
It is well known that translations of songs and poems not only breaks rhythm and rhyming patterns, but also results in loss of semantic information. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Hindu philosophical text originally written in Sanskrit that features a conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna prior to the Mahabharata war. The Bhagavad Gita is a...
Class imbalance in a dataset is a major problem for classifiers that results in poor prediction with a high true positive rate (TPR) but a low true negative rate (TNR) for a majority positive training dataset. Generally, the pre-processing technique of oversampling of minority class(es) are used to overcome this deficiency. Our focus is on using th...
Autoencoders gained popularity in the deep learning revolution given their ability to compress data and provide dimensionality reduction. Although prominent deep learning methods have been used to enhance autoencoders, the need to provide robust uncertainty quantification remains a challenge. This has been addressed with variational autoencoders so...
The shortage of outcropping ore deposits and the inefficiency of traditional methods for discovering deep-seated deposits have increased the necessity for developing three-dimensional modeling methods for in-depth exploration. 3DWofE, a Python-based open-source software package, provides the tools required for three-dimensional modeling of conceale...
Neuroevolution is a machine learning method for evolving neural networks parameters and topology with high degree of flexibility that makes them applicable to a wide ranger of architectures. Neuroevolution has been popular in reinforcement learning, and also shown to be promising for deep learning. The major feature of Bayesian optimisation is in r...
Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks, have long been applied to image and multi-media tasks, particularly those with structured data. More recently, there has been more attention to unstructured data that can be represented via graphs. These types of data are often found in health and medicine, social networks, and research d...
Social media has played a crucial role in shaping the worldview during election campaigns. It has been used as a medium for political campaigns and a tool for organizing protests; some of which have been peaceful, while others have led to riots. Previous research indicates that understanding user behaviour, particularly in terms of sentiments expre...
Class imbalance in a dataset is a major problem for classifiers that results in poor prediction with a high true positive rate (TPR) but a low true negative rate (TNR) for a majority positive training dataset. Generally, the pre-processing technique of oversampling of minority class(es) are used to overcome this deficiency. Our focus is on using th...
Recently, there has been much attention in the use of machine learning methods, particularly deep learning for stock price prediction. A major limitation of conventional deep learning is uncertainty quantification in predictions which affect investor confidence. Bayesian neural networks feature Bayesian inference for providing inference (training)...
Time series prediction with neural networks has been the focus of much research in the past few decades. Given the recent deep learning revolution, there has been much attention in using deep learning models for time series prediction, and hence it is important to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we present an evaluation stud...
The application of Bayesian inference for deep learning remains limited due to the computational requirements of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Recent advances in parallel computing and advanced proposal schemes in sampling, such as incorporating gradients has provided the potential for Bayesian deep learning methods to be implemented...
Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks, have long been applied to image and multi-media tasks, particularly those with structured data. More recently, there has been more attention to unstructured data that can be represented via graphs. These types of data are often found in health and medicine, social networks, and research d...
Autoencoders gained popularity in the deep learning revolution given their ability to compress data and provide dimensionality reduction. Although prominent deep learning methods have been used to enhance autoencoders, the need to provide robust uncertainty quantification remains a challenge. This has been addressed with variational autoencoders so...
It is well known that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) faced limitations in learning long-term dependencies that have been addressed by memory structures in long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Matrix neural networks feature matrix representation which inherently preserves the spatial structure of data and has the potential to provide better mem...
Social scientists and psychologists take interest in understanding how people express emotions or sentiments when dealing with catastrophic events such as natural disasters, political unrest, and terrorism. The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophic event that has raised a number of psychological issues such as depression given abrupt social changes a...
Time series prediction with neural networks have been focus of much research in the past few decades. Given the recent deep learning revolution, there has been much attention in using deep learning models for time series prediction, and hence it is important to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we present an evaluation study t...
As a primary step in mineral exploration, a variety of features are mapped such as lithological units, alteration types, structures, and minerals. These features are extracted to aid decision-making in targeting ore deposits. Different types of remote sensing data including satellite optical and radar, airborne, and drone-based data make it possibl...
Air pollution has a wide range of implications on agriculture, economy, road accidents, and health. In this paper, we use novel deep learning methods for short-term (multi-step-ahead) air-quality prediction in selected parts of Delhi, India. Our deep learning methods comprise of long short-term memory (LSTM) network models which also include some r...
Although global circulation models (GCMs) have been used for the reconstruction of precipitation for selected geological time slices, there is a lack of a coherent set of precipitation models for the Mesozoic-Cenozoic period (the last 250 million years). There has been dramatic climate change during this time period capturing a super-continent hoth...
We have entered an era of a pandemic that has shaken the world with major impact to medical systems, economics and agriculture. Prominent computational and mathematical models have been unreliable due to the complexity of the spread of infections. Moreover, lack of data collection and reporting makes any such modelling attempts unreliable. Hence we...
Traditional approaches to develop 3D geological models employ a mix of quantitative and qualitative scientific techniques, which do not fully provide quantification of uncertainty in the constructed models and fail to optimally weight geological field observations against constraints from geophysical data. Here, using the Bayesian Obsidian software...
Questions
Questions (18)
Google Scholar ranks journals according to h-index while impact factor is well known as a ranking system. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Let's discuss.
Given the recent issues by the Astrazeneca vaccine, how can the scientific community ensure that there is transparency in the test process? What sort of sampling should be done and how can mobile technologies and artificial intelligence play a part?
Nature seems to have a deep source of knowledge and intelligence that is intangible. Consciousness (nature) is an engineer and a scientist as the design of life needs far too advanced technology. What makes an ant move and what creates the design of an ant to behave in a certain way and survive in harsh conditions? Where are the design plans? Where is the software that learns and adapts in order to survive? Who made that software? What type of programming has been used?
What is the current progress in science and philosophy regarding definitions of a human being at fetus stage and relation to consciousness?
Conscious experience or Qualia is known as the hard problem of consciousness.
If awareness is the state of 'being aware', during sleep are we aware?
I assume that too much of source data or irrelevant source data contributes to negative transfer and hence makes learning difficult.
Is there any analytical or experimental work that evaluates how much of data or quality knowledge in target data is needed for successful transfer learning?
Reviews and rebuttals, names of reviewers could add value to the published material and provides further transparency to the process.
Pantheism views life and nature as God. When scientists describe ecology and a number of biological processes, they will the gaps in their explanation by "nature", "nature has its way of doing things", etc
What is the current state of art that studies machine consciousness which is related to data science and machine learning?