Dr Andrew Lensen

Cotton 354

School of Engineering and Computer Science

THW-VUW, Wellington 6012, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Kia ora!

I am a Senior Lecturer (Pūkenga Matua) in Artificial Intelligence (Atamai Horihori) at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington (THW-VUW), Aotearoa/New Zealand. I’m a born-and-bred Wellingtonian. There’s some details about my academic work below; the header bar also has links to my profile on most academic “social media”. A link to my email is up there, too.

research interests

My core research interests center around explainable AI, genetic programming, unsupervised learning (nonlinear dimensionality reduction), and real-world/interdisciplinary AI in New Zealand. I am also interested in the social and ethical implications of AI, as well as aspects of deep learning, such as embedding/manifold learning methods. For further information about my research, take a look at the projects and publications pages.

student opportunities

I am always looking for passionate and dilligent students for summer scholarships, research assistance, honour’s projects, and Masters or doctoral (PhD) study. If my research sounds interesting to you, please get in touch — especially if you have your own research idea that you are eager to pursue!

collaboration

I am interested in collaborating with researchers across different disciplines to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinary AI. I am also open to collaboration with government and industry on projects that align with my interests. I have some limited capacity for consultancy work.

teaching

In addition to my research, I also lecture in a range of AI and general computer science courses. My full teaching record is here.

We are offering a brand-new major in AI at THW-VUW from 2023 — the first University in NZ to do so. Take a look. We also have a very strong postgraduate qualification, the Master of AI.

Interested in AI but don’t want a full degree — or missing a programming/maths background? Check out the “Introduction to AI” (AIML 131) I teach, which is a new first-year course designed for an audience with no background in AI.

selected publications

Explainable Artificial Intelligence by Genetic Programming: A Survey

Yi Mei, Qi Chen, Andrew Lensen, Bing Xue, and Mengjie Zhang

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Nov 2023

Bib PDF DOI

@article{mei2022explainable,
  author = {Mei, Yi and Chen, Qi and Lensen, Andrew and Xue, Bing and Zhang, Mengjie},
  title = {Explainable Artificial Intelligence by Genetic Programming: A Survey},
  journal = {{IEEE} Transactions on Evolutionary Computation},
  pages = {621--641},
  year = {2023},
  volume = {27},
  number = {3},
  month = nov,
  day = {25},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/TEVC.2022.3225509},
}

Feature-based Image Matching for Identifying Individual Kākā

Fintan O’Sullivan, Kirita-Rose Escott, Rachael Shaw, and Andrew Lensen

arXiv, Jan 2023

Bib PDF DOI

@article{osullivan2023feature,
  author = {O'Sullivan, Fintan and Escott, Kirita{-}Rose and Shaw, Rachael and Lensen, Andrew},
  title = {Feature-based Image Matching for Identifying Individual Kākā},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2301.06678},
  eprinttype = {arXiv},
  eprint = {2301.06678},
  journal = {arXiv},
  month = jan,
  day = {17},
}

Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Assault Sentence Prediction in New Zealand

Harry Rodger, Andrew Lensen, and Marcin Betkier

Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Aug 2022

Bib PDF DOI

@article{rodger2022explainable,
  author = {Rodger, Harry and Lensen, Andrew and Betkier, Marcin},
  title = {Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Assault Sentence Prediction in New Zealand},
  journal = {Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand},
  year = {2022},
  month = aug,
  pages = {1--15},
  day = {15},
  publisher = {Taylor & Francis},
  doi = {10.1080/03036758.2022.2114506},
}