Taran Cyriac John

Taran Cyriac John (Taran John)

PhD Candidate at Victoria University of Wellington.
NASA JPL Research Affiliate.
ML Scientist Contractor.

Taran Cyriac John and Taran John are the same person. Academic publications and grant records list the full name Taran Cyriac John, while press coverage and university profiles often use Taran John.

Publications

  1. Juan Manuel Delfa Victoria, Taran Cyriac John, Andrew W. Herson. "NAVI-Orbital: First In-Orbit Demonstration of a Zero-Shot Vision-Language Model for Autonomous Earth Observation". arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.18271, 2026. arXiv: 2606.18271
  2. Taran Cyriac John, Giovanni Iacca, Qurrat Ul Ain, Harith Al-Sahaf, Mengjie Zhang. "Evolving Ternary Patterns and Discriminative Localisation for Basal Cell Carcinoma Detection". In Proceedings of the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications, part of EvoStar), 2026. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-23604-3_11
  3. Taran Cyriac John, Qurrat Ul Ain, Harith Al-Sahaf, Mengjie Zhang. "Genetic Programming with Co-operative Co-evolution for Feature Manipulation in Basal Cell Carcinoma Identification". In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications, part of EvoStar), 2025. Best Paper Nominee. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-90062-4_16
  4. Taran Cyriac John, Qurrat Ul Ain, Harith Al-Sahaf, Mengjie Zhang. "Towards Clinically Oriented Feature Detection for Melanoma: A Deep Learning Approach". In 39th International Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand (IVCNZ), 2024. DOI: 10.1109/IVCNZ64857.2024.10794460
  5. Taran Cyriac John, Qurrat Ul Ain, Harith Al-Sahaf, Mengjie Zhang. "Evolving Feature Extraction Models for Melanoma Detection: A Co-operative Co-evolution Approach". In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications, part of EvoStar), 2024. Best Paper Award. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-56852-7_26
  6. Taran Cyriac John, Muhammad Shabbir Abbasi, Harith Al-Sahaf, Ian Welch, Julian Jang-Jaccard. "Evolving malice scoring models for ransomware detection: An automated approach by utilising genetic programming and cooperative coevolution". Computers & Security, 2023. DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2023.103215
  7. Taran Cyriac John. "The Ethical Considerations of Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Decision Support". In Proceedings of the Wellington Faculty of Engineering Ethics and Sustainability Symposium, 2022. DOI: 10.26686/wfeess.vi.7649
  8. Taran Cyriac John, Muhammad Shabbir Abbasi, Harith Al-Sahaf, Ian Welch. "Automatically evolving malice scoring models through utilisation of genetic programming: a cooperative coevolution approach". In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO), 2022. DOI: 10.1145/3520304.3529063

Awards

  1. 2025 New Zealand Space Scholarship — NASA JPL internship, awarded by Minister for Space Hon. Judith Collins at Parliament, 5 June 2025. (Beehive announcement, MBIE profile)
  2. Outstanding Student, EvoStar 2025. (announcement)
  3. Best Paper Nominee, EvoApplications 2025 (part of EvoStar) — for Genetic Programming with Co-operative Co-evolution for Feature Manipulation in Basal Cell Carcinoma Identification. (awards page)
  4. SPECIES Scholarship 2024 — Society for the Promotion of Evolutionary Computation in Europe and Surroundings. Three-month research residency at the University of Trento, hosted by Prof. Giovanni Iacca. (announcement)
  5. Outstanding Student, EvoStar 2024. (announcement)
  6. Best Paper Award, EvoApplications 2024 (part of EvoStar) — for Evolving Feature Extraction Models for Melanoma Detection: A Co-operative Co-evolution Approach. (awards page)

Experience

Education

Press

Elsewhere