We are excited to profile our CIRES graduate, Dr Hechuan Wen, who celebrated his PhD graduation last week at The University of Queensland’s graduation ceremony in Shanghai.
How can organisations make informed decisions when the data available are limited, changing, or incomplete?
This question became the focus of CIRES PhD graduate Dr Hechuan Wen’s thesis, Advancing Causal Effect Estimation: From Training Data Expansion to Estimator Design, supervised by Associate Professor Rocky Chen, Professor Hongzhi Yin, Dr Li Kheng Chai, and Professor Shazia Sadiq.
Rather than simply predicting what is likely to happen, Hechuan studied how AI can estimate what would happen to an individual or community under a particular intervention, such as a healthcare policy, treatment, or public service. His research focused on making causal effect estimation more reliable and practical when real-world data are imperfect. Specifically, he addressed three key challenges: identifying the most informative data when labelling resources are limited; maintaining reliable estimates when data distributions change or important variables become unavailable; and quantifying uncertainty when causal effects are estimated from complex, interconnected data.
Reflecting on the importance of building connections throughout his PhD journey, Hechuan offers the following advice to current and future research students:
“My advice would be to stay focused on a meaningful research problem but remain open to where the PhD journey may take you. Research rarely progresses exactly as planned, and some of the most important learning happens when methods fail, data are imperfect, or questions need to evolve. I would also encourage students to look beyond publications and technical performance. Working with partner organisations, domain experts, and researchers from different backgrounds can broaden your perspective, strengthen the relevance of your research, and open opportunities that extend well beyond the PhD.”
Pictured above: Dr Hechuan Wen, UQ Graduation Day in Shanghai, October 2026.
We are excited to profile our first CIRES graduate, Dr 
Professor Susan Williams from the Universität Koblenz Germany, is visiting our Swinburne University of Technology node from the 4th to 9th February 2024. Sue is a Professor of Enterprise Information Management and will be collaborating and working with CIRES Chief Investigator Dr Paul Scifleet, and CIRES PhD Researchers Lufan Zhang and Pa Pa Khin.
As an interdisciplinary researcher with expertise in the areas of social and organisational informatics, Sue’s work focuses on information ecologies and the design of the digital workplace. With an academic background in computer and information science, her research examines complex socio-technical change (STC) and human-centred technology design. Her long-term research programme investigates the challenges associated with understanding how new information infrastructures are shaping work and work practices, and the design of digital workspaces and workplaces to support distributed collaborative work.
CIRES Chief Investigator Dr Paul Scifleet is looking forward to the collaboration. “Professor William’s is one of the world’s leading researchers in Enterprise Information Management and the challenges businesses face today in managing the ever-increasing amount of vital information shared in workplace collaboration technologies. We are excited to be working with Professor Williams to improve the information resilience of Australian businesses facing the same concerns.”