AIML celebrates academic promotions and ARC Discovery Project successes
Academic promotions
Congratulations to AIML academics Dr Feras Dayoub, Dr Lauren Oakden-Rayner, and Dr Melissa McCradden on their recent academic promotions to Associate Professor.
Dr Feras Dayoub leads the Embodied AI and Robotic Vision Research Group; serves as Co-Director of the CNRS International Research Laboratory CROSSING; and is Program Director of the Master of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the University of Adelaide. He’s been a Senior Lecturer at AIML for 3 years.
“In… my most recent role as Senior Lecturer, some of the highlights included building the Embodied AI & Robotic Vision Research Group from zero to 4 postdocs, 5 higher degree by research (HDR) students, and 2 research engineers,” said Dr Dayoub. “We’ve also grown AIML’s robotics capability from one to 6 advanced robots, and strengthened international collaborations through my roles as Co-Director of CROSSING and AI Theme Lead in the Adelaide–Surrey strategic partnership.”
“In my Associate Professor role, I hope to continue to grow my HDR and early career researcher (ECR) team and industry-engaged PhD projects within the Embodied AI & Robotic Vision Group, deepen strategic partnerships such as CROSSING 2.0, and pursue centre-scale, multi-partner bids,” he continued. “I’m also excited to support the newly established Adelaide University by contributing to research, teaching, translation, and national capability.”
(L–R): Dr Feras Dayoub, Dr Lauren Oakden-Rayner, and Dr Melissa McCradden.
Dr Lauren Oakden-Rayner was previously a Senior Research Fellow at AIML and a radiologist by training. Her research explores the intersection of computer science and clinical medical practice, with a particular focus on medical AI safety.
“Among the highlights of my current role was acting as the inaugural Ethics Chair for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 2024,” said Dr Oakden-Rayner. “Alongside my colleague Kristian Lum, we introduced the first ever ethics review process for this major ML conference.”
“[As Associate Professor], I’m keen to continue working on AI safety and ethics, both in medicine and more broadly across the technology space.”
Dr Melissa McCradden is a world-renowned expert in bioethics and the responsible integration of AI in medicine. She is a Deputy Director at AIML; Clinical Fellow in Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at The Hospital Research Foundation (THRF) Group; and Deputy Research Director and AI Director at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide.
She also leads Project CANAIRI (Collaboration for trANslational AI tRIals), a global initiative that tests AI tools in real-world clinical environments to ensure they perform effectively, equitably, and ethically across diverse healthcare settings.
“I’m very excited with this new opportunity as Associate Professor and to be able to continue working with the talented members of my team”, said Dr McCradden.
Both Dr Oakden-Rayner and Dr McCradden are members of AIML’s Medical Machine Learning team who work to develop new algorithms and AI models that can interpret medical data and improve clinical diagnosis and prognosis.
ARC Discovery Project funding success
AIML also congratulates its researchers on securing new funding through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Program for 2026, which supports fundamental research across Australian universities. Two AIML-led projects received Discovery Project funding this round.
Building Generative Models for 3D Reconstruction and Visual Perception, led by AIML Director Professor Simon Lucey and Future Making Fellow Dr Ravi Garg, aims to build generative models for the 3D reconstruction of 2D images. The project will develop frameworks that interpret images by generating them, enabling robotic agents to plan and execute desired actions with precision and strengthening Australian AI sovereignty.
(L–R): Dr Ravi Garg and Professor Simon Lucey.
Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Game-Based Reasoning and Evaluation, led by AIML Associate Professor Qi Wu and Lecturer Dr Xinyu Wang, will focus on advancing Vision-Language Models (VLMs), a key area of research that bridges visual understanding and natural language reasoning.
“We’ve developed novel methods for multimodal understanding, including visual question answering, image captioning, and embodied AI,” said Associate Professor Wu. “These efforts have laid the groundwork for our new Discovery Project, which aims to push the boundaries of VLMs by addressing their limitations in reasoning, decision-making, and adaptability.”
(L–R): Associate Professor Qi Wu and Dr Xinyu Wang.
“This project will develop innovative evaluation tools and training strategies that better assess and enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models. By focusing on complex problem-solving and adaptability, we aim to create models that are not only more intelligent but also more applicable across domains such as healthcare, business, and education.”
Dr Xinyu Wang utilised his previous research at AIML in developing the project.
“My postdoctoral work at AIML focused on multimodal large language models, particularly improving their efficiency in fine-tuning and enhancing their reasoning capabilities,” said Dr Wang. “These works contributed directly to our new Discovery Project.”
“With the new support, we plan to develop evaluation toolkits and training pipelines powered by virtual environments, particularly using video games,” he continued. “We’ll also explore ways to transfer knowledge and skills learned in virtual settings to real-world, high-stakes domains such as healthcare, business, and education.”
To view all funded Discovery Projects for 2026, please visit the ARC website.