Xingchen Zhang

Xingchen Zhang

Senior Lecturer in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence, Director of the Fusion Intelligence Lab

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 Lab. 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 and Research Associate in the same department (working with Prof. Yiannis Demiris) 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).

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

Joining my Fusion Intelligence Lab at the University of Exeter

I am always looking for self-motivated PhD students. If you’re interested in joining my Fusion Intelligence Lab 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.

  • EPSRC PhD studentship available (home fee-status students only)! I am looking for candidates to apply for an EPSRC DTP PhD studentship (for January 2025 entry) to join my group to work on a project entitled “Efficient Deep Learning Algorithms for Pedestrian-Centric Multimodal Robot Perception”. Our Head of Department, Prof. Andrew Howes will be the co-supervisor. The application deadline is 4th October 2024 via this website. More details about the project can be found here.

  • 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.

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.

News

[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] 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.

[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.

[06/2024] One paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Congratulations to Zixian! This paper resulted from Zixian’s MSc project at Imperial College London, where Prof. Demiris and I were his supervisors.

[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 Lab at the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter.

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

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

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[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 have got distinction!

[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.

Funders

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

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Contact

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