Team

I have supervised and co-supervised students at various universities and continue to do so in my current role. I deeply enjoy supporting students’ growth and development through my supervision. As Mencius the philosopher said, attracting talented individuals from all over the world and educating them is one of the greatest joys in life.

• In 2025, I received the Dean of PGR’s Commendation for Excellence in Supervision in the University of Exeter.

• In 2026, My PhD student Zixian Zhao received the Dean of Postgraduate Research’s Commendation for Excellence in Academic Citizenship.

• In 2026, My BSc student Aditya Bhardwaj received the Computer Science Prizes for MSc students (Faculty Commendations - A).

• In 2025, My MSc student Qinqing Li received the Computer Science Prizes for MSc students (Faculty Commendations - A).

Current team

University of Exeter:

At the University of Exeter, I lead the Fusion Intelligence Laboratory, where I supervise PhD, MSc, and undergraduate students.

PhD students (as primary supervisor):

• Zixian Zhao. Co-supervisor: Prof. Andrew Howes (Head of the Department of Computer Science)

• Ning Wang. Co-supervisor: Prof. Xujiong Ye

• Quangao Liu. Co-supervisor: Prof. Lu Liu

• Yanlong Meng. Co-supervisor: Dr. Shelley Keating (University of Queensland), Prof. Nicholas Gilson (University of Queensland), Dr. Samantha Van Beurden (Exeter)

• Yuan Gao.

MSc students:

• Ali Sajjad (2026)

Alumni

My students have pursued diverse career paths: some have become faculty members at Chinese universities, others have joined leading companies like Google and Bosch, while others have continued their academic journey by pursuing PhDs at prestigious universities.

University of Exeter:

• MSc students

  • Taylor Xu (2026)

  • Nikhil Anil Deshmukh (2026)

  • Shuai Wei (2026)

  • Xiaotong Gao (2026)

  • Qinqing Li (2025)
    - Distinction
    - Computer Science Prizes for MSc students (Faculty Commendations - A), which is awared to students who have made a significant contribution to the faculty)
    - Now a Software Engineer in DeGould

  • Heegon Kim (2025): Distinction

  • Mujeeb Adewuyi Sonibare (2025)

  • Raghavendra Margasahayam Venkatesh (2025)

  • Yuanhang Zhang (2025)

  • Xuan Zhang (2025)

  • Charlie Wilkinson (2024): Leveraging NLP and ML to Predict and Differentiate Substance Abuse Statuses: Uncovering Key Linguistic Indicators

  • Ahmer Jalil Najar (2024): Advanced Sentiment Analysis in Sub-Reddit Discussions

  • Yifeng Wang (2024): NLP Techniques for Anonymising Sensitive Data

• BSc students

  • Aditya Bhardwaj (2026)

  • Oliver Johnson (2026)

  • Hivda Nasiroglu (2026)

  • Jason Chung (2026)

  • Rahul Somani (2026)

  • Toby Shelford (2025)

  • Zihan Wang (2025)

Imperial College London:

I was the primary supervisor of one MSc student in Applied Machine Learning at the Department of EEE from 2022 to 2023 and have been an Assistant Supervisor appointed by Imperial College since December 2020. All the MSc students I supervised or co-supervised at Imperial College got their degrees with distinction. Additionally, I am a mentor of Imperial’s Activate Student Mentoring Programme, where I supported one PhD student to enhance her academic and professional development.

• As the primary supervisor

  • Zixian Zhao (MSc, distinction)
    • Topic: Computer Vision-based Video Anonymisation for Privacy Protection
    • Published one paper in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems based on the MSc project
    • Now a PhD student at the University of Exeter (fully funded by the university)

• As a mentor of Imperial’s Activate Student Mentoring Programme

  • Sneha Jha (PhD student)
    • Now Research and Development Lead, AI Collaboration Centre (AICC), Queen’s University Belfast & Ulster University

• As the assistant supervisor (co-supervise with Prof. Yiannis Demiris)

  • Zhigang Sun (MSc, distinction)

    • Topic: Visual Scene Understanding and Tracking from Traffic Cameras
    • Now a Research Engineer at Bosch Research

  • Victor Badoual (MEng)

    • Topic: Visual Scene Understanding and Tracking from Traffic Cameras
    • Now a Software Engineer at Google

  • Tobias Hillier (MEng)

    • Topic: Mixed Traffic Simulation for Autonomous Systems in Shared Spaces
    • Now a Project Engineer at Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

• As the co-supervisor

  • Ping Ye (PhD student)
    • Topic: Object tracking, information fusion
    • Now a lecturer at Ningxia University, China
  • Jun Liu (graduate student)
    • Topic: Object tracking
    • Now a lecturer at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, China
  • Shengyun Peng (undergraduate student)
    • Topic: Computer vision, object tracking
    • Now a PhD student in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology