Dr Xiaofang Zhou is Otto Poon Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is Head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is also Co-Director of HKUST Big Data Institute (BDI), and Founding Director of Jockey Club STEM Lab of Data Science Foundations (DSF), HKUST-HKPC Joint Lab on Industrial AI and Robotics Research (INAIR), HKUST-MetaX Joint Lab on Advanced AI Computing, and several other HKUST joint labs with leading industry players. He is a Global STEM Scholar of Hong Kong and a Fellow of IEEE.

Professor Zhou's research focus is to find effective and efficient solutions for managing, integrating and analyzing large-scale complex data for business, scientific and personal applications. He has been working in spatiotemporal databases, data quality management, big data analytics, recommender systems, machine learning and AI, co-authored over 500 research papers. He received the Best Paper Awards of WISE 2012&2013, ICDE 2015&2019, DASFAA 2016 and ADC 2019. He was the Program Committee Chair of IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013), ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2016), and International Conference on Very Large Databases (PVLDB 2020). He was the General Chair of ACM Multimedia Conference (MM 2015). He was a keynote speaker at WISE 2008, CIKM 2015, DEXA 2018, MDM 2019, ADMA 2023. 

He was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Queensland from 1999 - 2020, leading its Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) research group and the Data Science discipline. He is also a Chair Professor at HKUST Shenzhen Research Institute and an Affiliate Professor at HKUST (Guangzhou).