Rate My Professor Aaron Wong

Dr Aaron Wong is an Honorary Lecturer in the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Priority Research Centre for Stroke and Brain Injury, School of Science (Computer Science and Software Engineering), College of Engineering, Science and Environment, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science, Bachelor of Computer Engineering, Honours, and PhD in Computer Science, all from the University of Newcastle. Wong's involvement with the university's NUbots team during his studies contributed to their global victory at the 2008 RoboCup World Championship in Suzhou, China. He also developed a rescue robot for the RoboCup Federation, focusing on sound recognition and localisation. His PhD research advanced acoustic and image processing techniques to enable robots to process emotions by integrating sensory inputs—such as visual features including colour, fractal dimension, and facial perception—with affective computing principles.

Wong's research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, biofeedback, and neuroimaging using EEG and MRI data. Following his PhD, he served in a part-time technical support role in Associate Professor Frini Karayanidis’s Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory and collaborated with various research groups, including efforts to model brain function from neuroimaging data to optimize patient assessments and minimize MRI scans in clinical settings. In 2011, he launched the University of Newcastle’s RoboCup Junior project to foster STEM education through robotics in primary schools. Key publications comprise 'Theta frontoparietal connectivity associated with proactive and reactive cognitive control processes' (2014), 'Robot Emotions Generated and Modulated by Visual Features of the Environment' (2013), 'Jointly modeling behavioral and EEG measures of proactive control in task switching' (2023), 'Dissociable theta networks underlie the switch and mixing costs during task switching' (2021), 'Task-switching costs have distinct phase-locked and nonphase-locked EEG power effects' (2020), and 'NUClear: A Loosely Coupled Software Architecture for Humanoid Robotics' (2016). He received the 2023 University of Newcastle Alumni Award for Outstanding Volunteerism. In addition to his honorary position, Wong is an Artificial Intelligence Engineering Manager at 4AI Systems.