Researchers at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) have been working on fundamental research in a range of areas of AI, ML and data science, and playing an international leadership role in evolutionary learning and optimisation, feature selection and big dimensionality reduction, automated deep learning and image analysis, multi-agent systems, categorical and ordinal data analysis, hyperheuristic and learning approaches to planning and scheduling, audio/language and signal processing, explainable AI, stream data mining, generative AI, and autonomous agents and multiagent systems. VUW researchers have been collaborating with other universities and CRIs and successfully applying AI and ML techniques to solve application tasks in primary industry, climate change, biological and health-related areas, high-value/ high-tech manufacturing such as cybersecurity and renewable energy, and ethical/cultural AI and public policies as well as starting a pipeline of training Māori researchers in AI and data science. VUW AI researchers have collaborations with many international organisations, including universities in the USA (e.g. MIT, Michigan State University, Oklahoma State University and University of Rhode Island), China (e.g. Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Southern China University, Southern University of Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, and Zhengzhou University), the UK (e.g. University of Warwick, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Surrey and University of Birmingham), Australia (e.g. University of Melbourne, RMIT University, UTS, Central Queensland University and UNSW Canberra, Singapore (e.g. NUS and NTU), and Europe (e.g. Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, and University of Parma, Italy, Technische Universität Wien, Austria, University of Lisbon, Portugal, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland,). In addition, VUW AI researchers have been collaborating with major international AI communities and societies (e.g. IEEE Computational Intelligence, Computer, and Signal Processing Societies, ACM SigEVO, ACM SigKDD, IJCAI and AAAI), chairing technical committees, and working with globally innovative companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Huawei, KPMG, Xero and Weta Digital. In June 2023, VUW established the Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, launched by the Minister of Research, Science, and Innovation Dr Ayesha Verrall of the NZ Government and the President of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.