CANBERRA, May 22 (Xinhua) -- Professor Tao Dacheng, a computer scientist at the University of Sydney, was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) on Tuesday, one of 21 new Fellows recognized for their outstanding contributions to science.

Among the group are Australian scientist, Dr Alan Andersen, who has revealed the hidden world of ants and, in doing so, became the first person from the Northern Territory to be elected a Fellow; mathematician Professor Geordie Williamson who, at age 36, became the academy's youngest living Fellow; and Professor Anne Kelso, who has strengthened Australia's position in global influenza virus surveillance and pandemic preparedness.

They join a prestigious Fellowship that includes six Nobel Prize winners and scientific luminaries such as Sir Mark Oliphant, Professor Nancy Millis, Sir Douglas Mawson, Professor Frank Fenner and Sir David Attenborough.

In its citation on Tuesday, the AAS said: Tao Dacheng has made ground-breaking contributions in artificial intelligence, computer vision image processing and machine learning.

"More specifically, he has made fundamental research contributions to learning succinct, robust, and effective representations for data sampled from high dimensional or high order spaces, and collected from multiple tasks or sources."

"He has contributed insightful new ways to explain why, when and how a learning model performs well, and has developed useable algorithms for practical applications, such as face recognition, autonomous driving, web image search, and activity analysis."

The new Fellows' pioneering contributions also include: revolutionising the way e-waste is recycled; changing the way we think about carbohydrate foods; research that led to the detection of gravitational waves; and new insights into how the immune system may be harnessed to devise new therapies for cancer and other diseases.

In a statement on Tuesday, AAS president, Professor Andrew Holmes, congratulated the new Fellows for making significant and lasting impacts in their scientific disciplines.

"These scientists were elected by their Academy peers, following a rigorous evaluation process," he said.

Holmes said from 23 Founding Fellows in 1954, the new group elected this year brings the total number of living AAS Fellows to 568.