Bio

I am a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor) in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, where I lead the Fusion Intelligence Laboratory. I also serve as the Deputy Director of Business Engagement & Innovation at the Department. I am a Visiting Researcher at the Personal Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London.

Previously, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Personal Robotics Laboratory, Imperial College London, working with Prof. Yiannis Demiris. Before that, I was a Teaching Fellow (working with Prof. Krystian Mikolajczyk) and Research Associate (working with Prof. Yiannis Demiris) in the same department at Imperial College London. Additionally, I have previously held several roles at Imperial College London, including main supervisor of one MSc student, Assistant Supervisor and Mentor for Imperial’s Activate Student Mentoring Programme.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). I have been listed among the World’s Top 2% Scientists (Stanford University’s list, 2023, 2024)!

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. In 2022, I was a lecturer for the Deep Learning course at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, where I taught representation learning, generative models, reinforcement learning, hyperparameters and meta-learning to more than 100 MEng and MSc students. In 2021, I was awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship by the European Commission. Additionally, 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).

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 applications (e.g., RGB-T tracking, RGB-T segmentation, RGB-T crowd counting)
• Robotics and AI (Multimodal robot perception)
• Ethical AI (pedestrian privacy protection)

Joining my Fusion Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Exeter

I am always looking for self-motivated PhD students. If you’re interested in joining my Fusion Intelligence Laboratory as a PhD student or a visiting student, or if you wish to apply for postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowships), please email me your CV (Please DO NOT send me a very long email!). For more details and funding opportunities, please see the ‘Join My Group’ section.

• China Scholarship Council (CSC) and University of Exeter PhD scholarships! (The University of Exeter has 50 scholarships for Chinese students per year). The application deadline is 02 December 2024. Please see this website for more details about how to apply. Please make sure you are eligible for this scholarship before you send an email to me! The requirement of CSC can be found here. Applicants can select one project from the projected I listed online, or they can discuss with me to write their own research proposal.

Call for papers

Welcome to submit your manuscript to the following journals and special issues for which I am an editorial board member. Please feel free to contact me before submission if you have any questions.

• Chinese Journal of Information Fusion. [Details and Submission]. We always welcome submissions.

• Frontiers in Neurorobotics Special Issue: “Multi-source and Multi-domain Data Fusion and Enhancement: Methods, Evaluation, and Applications”. Deadline: 04 December 2024. [Details and Submission]

• Remote Sensing and Electronics Special Issue: “Advances in Detection-Oriented Multi-Sensor Fusion Beyond the Visible Spectrum”. Deadline: 31 December 2024. [Remote Sensing Submission] [Electronics Submission]

Incoming activities

[11/2024] I am organizing a BMVC2024 workshop entitled “DIFA: Deep Learning-based Image Fusion and Its Applications” with Dr. Zhixiang Chen from the University of Sheffield, Dr. Shuyan Li from Queen’s University Belfast, and Prof. Yiannis Demiris from Imperial College London. The workshop will be held in Glasgow, UK, on 27th November 2024. More details can be found on our workshop website.

[11/2024] I will attend the AI roundtable discussion at the Outstanding Young Scholars Society UK Annual Meeting, which will be held on 30th November 2024 in London.

[12/2024] I will give a talk entitled “Rethinking performance evaluation in image fusion” at the BMVA Symposium on Image & Video Quality, which will be held on 11 December 2024 in the British Computer Society (BCS), London.

[12/2024] I will give a talk entitled “How AI Transforms My Job” for the Around The World Webinar of the MCAA AI GIG (Marie Curie Alumni Association Artificial Intelligence General Interest Group). The talk will be on 13 December 2024.

News

[10/2024] Invited to give a research talk titled “Human-Centered Computer Vision: From Unimodality to Multimodality” at the University of University Open Day

[09/2024] I have been listed among the World’s Top 2% Scientists (Stanford University’s list, 2024)! This is the second time I have been recognized as one of the “World’s Top 2% Scientists”.

[09/2024] Welcome Zixian to join my lab as a PhD student!

[09/2024] I started to serve as the Deputy Director of Business Engagement & Innovation at the Department of Computer Science.

[08/2024] Invited by the Outstanding Young Scholars Society UK to give a talk about faculty positions and fellowship applications.

[08/2024] Started serving as an Associate Editor for the Chinese Journal of Information Fusion.

[07/2024] One paper has been accepted by Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics. This is a collaborative paper with the Transport Systems & Logistics Lab at Imperial College London. We proposed an end-to-end approach for short-term traffic flow prediction using surveillance cameras.

[07/2024] Two of my IEEE T-PAMI papers were selected as ESI Highly Cited Papers.

[06/2024] One paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Congratulations to Zixian! The paper is based on Zixian’s MSc project at Imperial College London, where I was his primary supervisor and Prof. Yiannis Demiris was his co-supervisor.

[06/2024] Invited to give a talk on 6th June at “Future of AI Awards 2024: Collaborate, Debate, Invent”. I introduced my research and shared 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 established the Fusion Intelligence Laboratory at the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter. The lab aims to use machine intelligence and multi-source information fusion to benefit humanity.

[04/2024] I joined the University of Exeter as a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor).

[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 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! So far, all the MSc students I supervised or co-supervised at Imperial College London have got distinction!

[09/2023] I have been listed among the World’s Top 2% Scientists (Stanford University’s list, 2023)!

[07/2023] I am now a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA)! [EEE Staff Newsletter] [EEE Staff Newsletter 2]

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

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

More news about me can be found here.

Selected funders

My research has received funding from several funders, including the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant.

Selected collaborators

Contact

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