Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI) AUT New Zealand

The Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI), housed at AUT Technology Park, was established in July 2002 to help the Knowledge Economy of New Zealand in terms of the development of intelligent information systems that enable Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Discovery in all areas of science and technology in the country.

Professor Nikola Kasabov is the founding director of KEDRI.

Objectives

1.	Establish itself as a leading consortium-type collaborative research institute in the area of information and knowledge engineering in New Zealand associated with all universities and research institutes in New Zealand that are working in the same area.
2.	Develop advanced methods and techniques for information engineering and knowledge discovery that are of high significance in the subject area.
3.	Publish results in top international journals, such as Nature, Science, IEEE etc, thus promoting internationally the science and technology of New Zealand.
4.	Create new intellectual property for the benefit of New Zealand.
5.	Establish itself internationally as a high profile research institute in the area of information and knowledge engineering.
6.	Invite researchers at the level of postdoctoral fellow from overseas for different periods of time and encourage them to publish results internationally.
7.	Promote information and knowledge engineering technologies across faculties and groups at AUT and other universities and institutes in New Zealand. Act as an incubator for research projects.
8.	Organise workshops, seminars and short courses.
9.	Attract significant research funds both in New Zealand and internationally.
10.	Within a three year period, develop three research centres and two laboratories, with staff number of about 30 researchers.
11.	Act as a link between academic research and commercial partners.
12.	Attract postgraduate students to work on research projects.

Research Centres

Neuro-Computing and Brain Science

This Centre conducts research on new methods for neuro information processing (connectionist methods); neurocomputing software and hardware systems and their applications; research on brain data analysis; research on adaptive speech recognition and multi-modal systems; adaptive systems that learn to predict, etc. The Centre is collaborating with several Institutions from overseas and universities across NZ

Bio-Infomatics

This Centre deals with the following research topics: novel methods for dynamic biological information representation and modelling; biological database management; biological information visualisation; gene data analysis and disease profiling; discovering genetic regulatory networks of gene interaction; analysis of protein data; modelling biological processes at a molecular and cellular level.

Computational Intelligence & and Decision Support Systems

This Centre deals with the following research topics: new methods for business data mining, data modelling and knowledge discovery; prognostic systems; web based decision support systems; decision support systems for pocket computers and other software and hardware implementations. The team has developed a neuro-decision support systems of NeuCom.

Research Laboratory for English and Maori Translation Systems

The laboratory will further develop the English and Maori Translation System along with the development of new methods and tools for English and Maori speech synthesis, speech recognition and machine translation, later adding other Central-Eastern-Polynesian languages.