Xiaohua Huang
Xiaohua (IEEE Senior Member, CCF Senior Member, ACM Member) is a Professor at the Nanjing Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the leader of the MIP-Lab at the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) in NJIT. He completed a research associate research stint at the University of Cambridge in 2018. Xiaohua has also worked closely with esteemed researchers such as Professor Matti Pietikäinen (IEEE Fellow, IAPR Fellow) and Professor Guoying Zhao (IEEE Fellow) at the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS), Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE), University of Oulu. In 2015, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Canberra.
Xiaohua's research on emotion recognition, particularly using deep learning, was supported by the Jorma Ollila Grant 2017 from the Nokia Foundation. More recently, he has secured funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Central Fund) and the Kaute Foundation (AI Fund) to advance his research in micro-expression analysis. He has also contributed to two Tekes-funded projects: "Facial Behavior Analysis 'in-the-wild'" and "Quantifying Human Experience for Increased Intelligence within Work Teams and in the Customer Interface."
Xiaohua began his academic journey as a research assistant at Southeast University (China) under the supervision of Professor Wenming Zheng. He later pursued his PhD at the University of Oulu, working with Professors Matti Pietikäinen and Guoying Zhao. His doctoral studies were supported by multiple grants, including the Senior Research Fellow Start-up package (Infotech Oulu), Academy of Finland project funding, and Tekes Project AFFECT. He also received external funding from the Nokia Foundation, including the Nokia Scholarship (2012, 2013), IEEE Biometric Travel Grant 2013, and the Infotech Oulu Doctoral Scholarship (2014).
His current research interests encompass human behavior analysis (including facial expression, micro-expression, group-level emotion recognition, and pain intensity estimation), affective computing (speech, multimodal and cross-database emotion recognition), face recognition, and texture analysis. Xiaohua is also focused on applying machine learning, computer vision, and deep learning to these domains.