Bio

I am a Senior Lecturer in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter. Before this, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Personal Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, working with Prof. Yiannis Demiris. Prior to this, I was a Teaching Fellow and Research Associate in the same department at Imperial College. Additionally, I have worked as the main supervisor of one MSc student, Assistant Supervisor and Mentor for Imperial’s Activate Student Mentoring Programme, at Imperial College London.

I am also a Visiting Researcher at the Personal Robotics Laboratory, Imperial College London, since April 2024. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).

In 2024, I was featured as “Imperial People” by Imperial College London. In 2023, I received the Imperial’s EEE Department Award for Citizenship and Community. I was selected as the “Fellow of the Month” by the Postdocs and Fellows Development Centre (PFDC) of Imperial College London in November 2023. I co-authored a book entitled Image Fusion, which won the National Science and Technology Academic Publications Fund of China (2019). I received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award of the 9th Chinese Conference on Information Fusion (2019).

I am a member of the UKRI Talent Peer Review College, where I review the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships, EPSRC New Investigator Award, EPSRC Open Fellowship, and EPSRC Standard Research Grant. I am also a reviewer for more than 20 well-known journals (e.g., IEEE TPAMI, IJCV, IEEE TIP, IEEE TNNLS, IEEE TMM, IEEE TIM, IEEE RAL, Information Fusion) and more than 10 conferences (e.g., CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, AAAI, BMVC, ACCV, ICRA, IROS).

Joining my group

If you’re interested in joining my group as a PhD student (a PhD studentship is available) or a visiting scholar, or if you wish to apply for postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowships), please email me your CV. For more details, see ‘Join My Group’ section for details.

[05/2024] I am looking for candidates to apply for a full PhD studentship (international fess plus tax-free stipend). The topic is “Deep Learning for multimodal information fusion”. Deadline: 31st May 2024. [Exeter website] [FindAPhD]

[05/2024] I am looking for candidates to apply for Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. The application deadline is 11 September 2024. Please contact me if you are interested in this fellowship.

Research interests

My research areas include

• Computer vision (e.g., object tracking, human pose estimation, human behavior prediction)
• Deep learning (e.g., multi-modal learning, self-supervised learning, graph-based learning)
• Image fusion (visible-infrared, multi-focus, multi-exposure)
• Multimodal perception and applications (e.g., RGB-T tracking, robot perception)
• Ethical AI

News

[05/2024] I will take the Deputy Director of Business Engagement & Innovation role at the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter

[04/2024] I will give a talk on 6th June at “Future of AI Awards 2024: Collaborate, Debate, Invent”. I will introduce my research and my fellowship experience.

[04/2024] I gave a talk at the BMVA One Day Meeting: Trustworthy Multimodal Learning with Foundation Models: Bridging the Gap between AI Research and Real World Applications on 24 April 2024.

[04/2024] I joined the University of Exeter as a Senior Lecturer.

[03/2024] I was featured as “Imperial People”.

[12/2023] I was awarded the Department Award for Citizenship and Community by the Department of EEE, Imperial College London. [Imperial News].

[11/2023] I gave an invited talk at the Redwood Academy entitled “Beauty of fusion: Deep learning-based image fusion and its applications” on 8th November 2023.

[11/2023] I was selected as “Fellow of the Month” by the Postdoc and Fellows Development Centre (PFDC), Imperial College London. [PFDC Newsletter].

[11/2023] My MSc student obtained his degree with distinction! Congratulations to Zixian! Zixian also submitted a journal paper together with me and Prof. Demiris based on his MSc project. So far, all the MSc students I supervised or co-supervised have got distinction!

[07/2023] It was a very nice experience to show EEE kids what we are doing at the Personal Robotics Lab at the Faculty of Engineering’s “Bring Your Child to Work Day”! In particular, I showcased the Unusual Cameras (thermal camera, event camera) of our lab. [Imperial News].

[07/2023] I was selected as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA)!

[06/2023] As an outreach activity of my MSCA fellowship, my demo “The Smart Wheelchair” at the Great Exhibition Road Festival 2023 was very successful! We attracted more than 2000 visitors during the weekend. We successfully introduced our smart wheelchair and our ongoing research to our visitors, including many children. [Imperial News].

[04/2023] A paper has been accepted by Pattern Recognition.

[03/2023] A paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[12/2022] I was invited to give a talk “The beauty of fusion: Deep learning-based image fusion and its applications” at China Agricultural University (online).

[04/2022] A paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[03/2022] I have taught five lectures for the Deep Learning (Spring 2021-2022, ELEC60009/96033/96039) course at the Department of EEE, Imperial College London, to more than 100 students. The topics are representation learning, generative models, reinforcement learning, hyperparameters, and meta-learning. It was a really nice experience to teach this course together with Prof. Krystian Mikolajczyk.

[01/2022] I will be a lecturer of ELEC60009/96033/96039 - Deep Learning (Spring 2021-2022) at the Department of EEE, Imperial College London.

[01/2022] A paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[05/2021] A paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[02/2021] My application for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships has been successful. This is one of the most prestigious fellowships in the world. [EEE Newsletter].

[02/2021] A paper has been accepted by Information Fusion.

[08/2020] The book Image Fusion that I co-authored has been published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press & Springer Nature Singapore. This book has won the National Science and Technology Academic Publications Fund of China (2019).

Contact

• Email: x (dot) zhang12 (at) exeter (dot) ac (dot) uk
• Address: Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RN