Rate My Professor Weijia Zhang

Dr. Weijia Zhang serves as Lecturer in Data Science and Applied Statistics in the School of Computer and Information Sciences within the College of Engineering, Science and Environment at the University of Newcastle, Australia, a position he has held since February 2023. He obtained his PhD in Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences from the University of South Australia in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Jiuyong Li, MSc in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 2014 under Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou, and BSc in Mathematics from Nanjing University in 2011. Previously, Zhang was an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Southeast University, China, from July 2021 to December 2022, and a Research Fellow at the University of South Australia from May 2018 to September 2020. His academic journey reflects a strong foundation in computational and statistical methodologies.

Zhang's research focuses on causal inference, machine learning, and survival analysis, particularly bridging gaps between statistical causal inference and weakly supervised machine learning techniques. Key publications include 'Deep Copula-Based Survival Analysis for Dependent Censoring with Identifiability Guarantees' (AAAI 2024), 'Disambiguated Attention Embedding for Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning' (NeurIPS 2023), 'Multi-instance partial-label learning: Towards exploiting dual inexact supervision' (Science China Information Sciences, 2023), 'Multi-instance causal representation learning for instance label prediction and out-of-distribution generalization' (NeurIPS 2022), 'Non-i.i.d. multi-instance learning for predicting instance and bag labels using variational auto-encoder' (IJCAI 2021), 'Treatment effect estimation with disentangled latent factors' (AAAI 2021), and 'Multi-Instance Learning with Distribution Change' (AAAI 2014). He has earned recognitions such as Top Reviewer Awards from AAAI (2021), Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (2022), and NeurIPS (2025), the Best Master Thesis Award from Nanjing University's Department of Computer Science and Technology (2014), 2nd place in the DREAM Data Mining Challenge on Disease Module Identification (2016), 2nd place in the 3 Minute Thesis Competition at the University of South Australia (2016), and scholarships including the University President’s Scholarship and ITMS Scholarship from the University of South Australia (2014). At the University of Newcastle, he coordinates and lectures courses such as STAT1060 Business Decision Making, STAT3040 Time Series Forecasting, and STAT6160 Data Analytics for Business Intelligence.