Rate My Professor Bernd Meyer

Bernd Meyer is a Professor of Data Science and AI in the Department of Data Science & AI, Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. He serves as Associate Dean (Sustainability), Deputy Director of the Environmental Informatics Hub, and Theme Lead for IT for Sustainability in Translational AI. Meyer earned his Dr. rer. nat. in Computer Science from FernUniversität in Hagen in 1994 and his Diplom Informatik from Technische Universität Braunschweig in 1990. His research specializations include self-organized systems and natural computation, collective behaviour and collective decision making, optimization in nature, and nature-inspired algorithms, particularly meta-heuristics for stochastic optimization. He develops mathematical and computational models of collective animal behaviour with a focus on social insects, alongside AI methods for animal monitoring, environmental monitoring, and bio-acoustics to support conservation management.

At Monash University, where he received a 25 Year Service Award, Meyer previously held the position of Associate Dean (Education) from 2010 to 2013 and has been Chief Investigator on multiple projects funded by the Australian Research Council, such as 'Self-organised communication as a foundation of large, complex societies' (2021-2024), 'Modelling collective behaviour to protect social insect ecosystem services' (2018-2022), and 'Division of Labour and Collective Homeostasis in Dynamic Environments' (2016-2017). With over 110 research outputs, key publications include 'Environmental sound classification on the edge: a pipeline for deep acoustic networks on extremely resource-constrained devices' (Pattern Recognition, 2023), 'Deep Active Audio Feature Learning in Resource-Constrained Environments' (IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 2024), 'Acoustic recognition of individuals in closed and open bird populations' (Ecological Informatics, 2025), and 'Age polyethism can emerge from social learning: A game-theoretic investigation' (PLoS Computational Biology, 2025). He teaches and serves as Chief Examiner for units including FIT1042 Algorithms, computation and intelligence, and FIT2004 Data Structures and Algorithms.