Emeritus / Honorary / Adjunct / Visiting Appointments and Professors of Practice

Prof. Xiaoyong Wei is a visiting professor of the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has been a professor and the head of the Department of Computer Science, Sichuan University of China since 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the City University of Hong Kong and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include Multimedia Computing, Health Computing, Machine Learning, and Large-Scale Data Mining. He is a senior member of IEEE, and has served as an associate editor of Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences since 2020, the program chair of ICMR 2019, ICIMCS 2012, and the technical committee member of over 20 conferences such as ICCV, CVPR, ACM MM, ICME, and ICIP.

Prof. Wei has been dedicating to his firm belief of teaching--research harmony. Most of his research ideas were inspired by teaching in which his focus is to build advanced AI technology to address classroom challenges. His work “Mining In-Class Social Networks for Large-Scale Pedagogical Analysis” has been considered as the first one to tackle in-school social networks (distinct from existing work using social media for after-school networks). His work of using drone patrol to analyze the students’ boredom level and teacher-student interactions has attracted extensive attention worldwide and been reported by mass media including BBC, The Telegraph, and CCTV. He has received the Pineapple Science Prize awarded by Dan Shechtman (Israel materials scientist and the Nobel Prize laureate), because these work while remaining as novel research, have also aroused the public enthusiasm for science.

Prof. Wei has recently initiated the Healthism project with Prof. Ramesh Jain of the University of California, Irvine. Healthism is an interdisciplinary project to tackle chronic diseases and significantly improve quality of life by going beyond the episodic health model developed for prevalent disease-centric-healthcare. Healthism focuses on physical and mental health to develop approaches for changing the way people adopt lifestyle for achieving best health to meet their desired goals.