Anton Van Den Hengel

Professor Anton Van Den Hengel

Director, Centre for Augmented Reasoning

Australian Institute for Machine Learning

Division of Research and Innovation


Anton van den Hengel is the Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) and Director of the Centre for Augmented Reasoning. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, a Chief Investigator of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Healthy Housing, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. The Centre for Augmented Reasoning (CAR), established in 2021, represents a $20m investment by the Australian Government in AI research. Professor van den Hengel was also the founder of AIML, Australia’s largest machine learning research group. Professor van den Hengel has been a CI on over $80m in research funding from sources, including Google, Facebook, Canon, BHP Billiton, and the ARC. Anton was a Director of Applied Science within Amazon for four years where he formed the Australian arm of Amazon’s International Machine Learning group.

Professor van den Hengel has won several awards, including the 2021 Australasian AI Outstanding Service Award, the Pearcey Foundation Entrepreneur Award, the SA Science Excellence Award for Research Collaboration, the CVPR Best Paper prize in 2010 and in 2025 was elected to the CORE Academy to recognise his significant and cumulative contribution to the development of the computing disciplines in Australasia. According to Google Scholar, he has authored over 440 publications, has over 37,000 citations and an h-index of 89. He has had 8 patents commercialised, formed 5 start-ups, and had a medical technology achieve first-in-class FDA approval. Current research interests include vision and language problems, image-based modelling, and semantic reconstruction.

  • Appointments

    Date Position Institution name
    2019 - ongoing Chief Scientist, Australian Institute for Machine Learning University of Adelaide
    2009 - ongoing Professor University of Adelaide
  • Awards and Achievements

    Date Type Title Institution Name Country Amount
    2017 Award SA Science Excellence Award for Research Collaboration SA State Government Australia -
    2017 Achievement First place in Visual Question Answering 2 challenge at CVPR 2017 Facebook and Georgia Tech United States -
  • Education

    Date Institution name Country Title
    1995 - 2000 University of Adelaide Australia Ph. D. in Computer Science
    1993 - 1994 University of Adelaide Australia Masters Degree in Computer Science
    1989 - 1993 University of Adelaide Australia Bachelor of Laws
    1988 - 1991 University of Adelaide Australia Bachelor of Mathematical Science
  • Research Interests

  • Current Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)

    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2025 Principal Supervisor Transformers for Generative Multimodal AI Master of Philosophy Master Full Time Mr Zachary Liptak Shinnick
    2024 Co-Supervisor Investigating Human-AI Interactions: An Empirical Foundation to Understand and Measure Human Perceptions of Machine Consciousness Master of Philosophy (Medical Science) Master Full Time Mr Oliver Craig Lack
    2020 Principal Supervisor Scalable deep learning for scene understanding Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Part Time Mr James Paul Bockman
  • Past Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)

    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2018 - 2022 Co-Supervisor Developing a System for Free-Form Visual Question Answering Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Miss Violetta Shevchenko
    2018 - 2023 Co-Supervisor Explainable Reinforcement Learning via Rule Extraction in Complex Visual Environments Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Anthony Manchin
    2015 - 2019 Co-Supervisor Real-Time Structure and Object Aware Semantic SLAM Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Mehdi Hosseinzadeh
    2015 - 2021 Co-Supervisor General and Fine-Grained Video Understanding using Machine Learning & Standardised Neural Network Architectures Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Hayden James Faulkner
    2014 - 2017 Co-Supervisor Deep Visual Representation for Weakly-supervised and Structured Output Tasks Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Yao Li
    2013 - 2018 Co-Supervisor Mid-level Representations for Action Recognition and Zero-shot Learning Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Ruizhi Qiao
    2013 - 2017 Co-Supervisor Dynamic Scene Understanding with Applications to Traffic Monitoring Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Qichang Hu
    2012 - 2014 Co-Supervisor Hypergraph Modeling for Saliency Detection and Beyond Master of Engineering Science Master Full Time Mr Yao Li
    2012 - 2018 Principal Supervisor Preventing Falls in Hospitals with Body Worn Batteryless Sensor Enabled RFID Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Roberto Luis Shinmoto Torres
    2011 - 2015 Co-Supervisor Learning Structured Prediction Models in Computer Vision Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Miss Fayao Liu
    2010 - 2014 Principal Supervisor Markov Random Fields with Unknown Heterogeneous Graphs Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Zhenhua Wang
    2009 - 2013 Principal Supervisor Constrained Parameter Estimation in Multiple View Geometry Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Zygmunt Ladyslaw Szpak
    2005 - 2013 Principal Supervisor Interactive 3D Reconstruction from Video Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Dr Ben Ward
    2003 - 2006 Co-Supervisor Robust Visual Tracking in Image Sequences Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Prof Chunhua Shen
    2000 - 2008 Co-Supervisor Reconstructing 3D Geometry from Multiple Images via Inverse Rendering Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr John Bastian
    2000 - 2008 Principal Supervisor The Automated Synchronisation of Independently Moving Cameras Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Dr Daniel Pooley
  • Board Memberships

    Date Role Board name Institution name Country
    2012 - ongoing Advisory Board Member Italian Institute of Technology Standing Committee of External Evaluators Italian Institute of Technology Italy
  • Editorial Boards

    Date Role Editorial Board Name Institution Country
    2010 - ongoing Associate Editor IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications - -
  • Offices Held

    Date Office Name Institution Country
    2016 - 2016 Area Chair Asian Conference on Computer Vision 2016 -
    2016 - 2016 Area Chair International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2016 -
    2014 - ongoing Program Lead, Analytics and Decision Support Data 2 Decisions CRC Australia
  • Position: Director, Centre for Augmented Reasoning
  • Phone: 83135309
  • Email: anton.vandenhengel@adelaide.edu.au
  • Fax: 83134366
  • Campus: North Terrace
  • Building: Australian Institute for Machine Learning, floor 1
  • Org Unit: Australian Institute for Machine Learning

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