Rate My Professor Dacheng Tao

Professor Dacheng Tao is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney, where he has been appointed since 2016. He holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellowship and previously served as Director of the UBTECH Sydney Artificial Intelligence Centre. His academic background includes a B.Eng. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2001, an M.Phil. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2004, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of London in 2007. Before joining the University of Sydney, he was a Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney.

Tao's research focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, image processing, and data science. He has developed fundamental methods for learning succinct, robust, and effective representations of high-dimensional data from multiple sources, along with practical algorithms for face recognition, autonomous driving, web image search, and activity analysis. His contributions have been recognized with major awards, including the Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2017, Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in 2018, ACM Fellowship in 2019, Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017, IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award in 2018, and the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science in 2020. As one of the world's most highly cited researchers, his publications have garnered over 180,000 citations with an h-index above 160. Key works include the book Foundations of Deep Learning (2021), and papers such as Knowledge Distillation: A Survey (International Journal of Computer Vision, 2021), A Survey on Vision Transformer (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2022), and DehazeNet: An End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal (IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2016).