Dr Xiaofang Zhou is the 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 the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is the 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 for Advanced AI Computing, and several other HKUST joint labs with leading industry players. He co-directed HKUST Big Data Institute (BDI) from 2022 to 2024. He is a Global STEM Scholar of Hong Kong and an IEEE Fellow.

Professor Zhou's research focuses on finding effective and efficient solutions for managing, integrating, and analyzing large-scale complex data across various applications. His expertise includes spatiotemporal databases, data quality management, big data analytics, recommender systems, machine learning, and AI. He has co-authored over 500 research papers and received multiple Best Paper Awards, including WISE 2012&2013, ICDE 2015&2019, DASFAA 2016, and ADC 2019. He has served as Program Committee Chair for ICDE 2013, CIKM 2016, PVLDB 2020, and General Chair for MM 2015 and ICDE 2025. He was also a keynote speaker at several conferences such as WISE 2008, CIKM 2015, DEXA 2018, MDM 2019, ADMA 2023, and ADC 2024. 

He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland (UQ), where he led the Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) research group and the Data Science discipline from 2006 to 2020. Before joining UQ in 1999, he was a senior research scientist and head of the Spatial Information Systems group at CSIRO. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Nanjing University and a PhD from UQ. He also serves as a Chair Professor at HKUST Shenzhen Research Institute.