Main Areas:
Recently, my main research mainly falls into three major areas which either align to or enhance the existing research groups in the Information School at the University of Sheffield:
(1) NLP and Network Analysis for Science and Academia (e.g., scientific text mining, scientometrics, metascience, research on research), which I expect to expand and grow significantly through collaboration in the Information School;
(2) NLP for Healthcare/Biomedical Informatics (e.g., evidence-based medicine, NLP solutions for primary care), which I expect to establish cross-department collaboration within the university of Sheffield;
(3) NLP and Network Analysis for Law, a field I am gradually developing in collaboration with the Law and Tech Lab in Maastricht University, the Netherlands, initially funded by the Royal Society International Exchange Scheme (Sep 2023-Aug 2024).
In addition to the above, I am open to, have worked on or been working on NLP applications in digital humanities, media, and business, among others (e.g., historical/literary text mining, multimodal sport video analysis, technology acceptance analysis, and so on).
I am supported by a Royal Society International Exchange Award "Breaking the Time Barrier: Using AI to Map the Evolution of Legal Precedents" (Sep 2023 ~ Aug 2024)
I was supported by a NSSFC grant "Classic Literary Text Analysis and Study based on Big Data Technologies" (2019 ~ 2023).
I was supported by a NSFC grant "Academic Recommendation and Search Based on Semantic Science Citation Indexing" and a NSF grant of Zhejiang Province of China "Automatic Academic Ranking and Recommendation Based on Heterogeneous Semantic Academic Networks".
Besides, I have two years of R&D experiences and am still extensively involved in data mining and visual analytics for smart city problems. Potential application scenarios include intelligent transportation, environmental pollution, etc.
I was actively involved in an European Regional Development Fund lead by Birmingham City Council to help creating values for Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Area. Besides
I am also actively participating in potential collaborative projects on applying big data analytics techniques to solve real-world problems.
During 2014-2015, I mainly worked on an International Collaboration project of Ministry of Science and Technology of China "Intelligent Traffic Flow Guidance Based on Big Traffic Data Analysis".
MRes/PhD Supervision:
Currently, I am mainly supervising/co-supervising and willing to discuss PhD projects/scholarships in the following directions:
Natural language processing and machine learning for mining biomedical publications and (semi-)automating systematic literature review
Natural language processing and network analytics for understanding science (scientific text mining and citation network analysis) and improving scientific research (meta-science or research on research)
Natural language processing and machine learning for improving the healthcare services in the primary and secondary care settings, e.g., clinical text classification, clinical information extraction, algorithmic clinical coding, etc.
Natural language processing and network analytics for legal informatics applications, such as legal citation network analysis and text mining of legal documents (cases, contracts, T&C, privacy notices)
Big data analytics and (multi-modal) natural language processing for solving real-world problems of social sciences, humanities and arts, such as digital inclusiveness, digital vulnerability, digital humanities, AI-assisted survey, multi-modal sport video summarisation, and so on.