Education

  • 2015.10-2019.10 Ph.D. in Computer Science University of Cambridge (Supervisor: Prof. Cecilia Mascolo)
  • 2014.10-2015.9 M.Phil. in Land Economy Research University of Cambridge
  • 2009.9-2014.7 B.Eng. in Urban Planning Harbin Institute of Technology

Work Experience

  • 2021.3-Present Renmin University of China
  • 2021.11–2022.4 Microsoft Research Asia Social Computing Group Visiting Scholar (Mentor: Dr. Xing Xie)
  • 2020.2-2021.2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Postdoctoral Researcher

RESEARCH INTERESTS

AI for Social Science
Spatio-Temporal Data Mining
Urban Computing
Human Mobility
Recommender Systems
Social Networks
Large Language Models-based Applications
(including multimodal healthcare spatiotemporal and embodied intelligence models).

For more information please visit our lab’s official WeChat account: LUMOS熠智AI-Lab.

Prospective Students/Staffs

As the principal investigator (PI) Dr Xiao Zhou founded the LUMOS AI Lab (AI for Urban Mobility & Societal Sciences) — 熠智AI实验室 (WeChat: LUMOS熠智AI-Lab) — dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence research for societal development. The name “LUMOS” is inspired by the Harry Potter spell “Lumos” used to illuminate the tip of a wand. We hope to harness the “magic” of AI to light up the future of cities and society.

The lab currently includes more than ten Ph.D. and master’s students as well as research assistants all devoted to developing and applying AI algorithms that promote more efficient sustainable and intelligent social governance and development. Members of the group have opportunities for joint research or training with institutions such as the University of Cambridge MSRA (Microsoft Research Asia) and BAAI (Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence).

We warmly welcome motivated graduate and undergraduate students who share our research interests to contact us and join our team!

Teaching

  • Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for the Social Sciences (General Education Core Course; featured in People’s Daily)
  • Smart Cities
  • Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Research Projects

1. National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Projects:

(1) Early Prediction and Intervention of Alzheimer’s Disease based on Multimodal Learning (Youth Science Fund Project No. 62106274) 2022.01 – 2024.12 Principal Investigator

(2) Distributed Native Graph Storage and Computing Methods for Graph Learning (Joint Fund Project No. U2241212) 2023.01 – 2026.12 Participant

2. Other Research Projects:

(1) Exploration and Application of Large Models for Search Behavior Kuaishou 2025.09 – 2026.08 Principal Investigator

(2) Research on Hallucination and Editing Algorithms for Industry Foundation Models Tencent 2024.12 – 2025.11 Principal Investigator

(3) Large Model–based Intelligent Health Management Assistant and QA System OPPO Guangdong Mobile Communications Co. Ltd. 2023.12 – 2024.11 Principal Investigator

(4) Game Recommendation System China Unicom 2021.08 – 2022.03 Principal Investigator

(5) The Effect of Policies and Human Mobility on the COVID-19 Epidemic Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 2020.09 – 2021.01 Principal Investigator

(6) The Changes in Physical Place and Digital Communication during the COVID Period Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 2020.09 – 2021.01 Participant

PUBLICATIONS

2026
Lost in Time? A Meta-Learning Framework for Time-Shift–Tolerant Physiological Signal Transformation
Qian Hong, Cheng Bian, Xiao Zhou*, Xiaoyu Li, Yelei Li, Zijing Zeng
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 26)
Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models
Xintong Li (本科生), Haoran Zhang (本科生), Xiao Zhou*
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 26)
MoHoBench: Assessing Honesty of Multimodal Large Language Models via Unanswerable Visual Questions
Yanxu Zhu, Shitong Duan, Xiangxu Zhang, Jitao Sang, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Xiao Zhou, Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 26)
2025
Think or Not? Exploring Thinking Efficiency in Large Reasoning Models via an Information-Theoretic Lens
Xixian Yong, Xiao Zhou*, Yingying Zhang, Jinlin Li, Yefeng Zheng, Xian Wu*
The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 25 Spotlight)
Counterfactual Reasoning for Steerable Pluralistic Value Alignment in Large Language Models
Hanze Guo#, Jing Yao#, Xiao Zhou*, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie
The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 25)
SoREX: Towards Self-Explainable Social Recommendation with Relevant Ego-Path Extraction
Hanze Guo#, Yijun Ma#, Xiao Zhou*
The ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 2025)
AutoMIR: Effective Zero-Shot Medical Information Retrieval without Relevance Labels
Lei Li, Xiangxu Zhang, Xiao Zhou*, Zheng Liu*
The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 25)
MotiveBench: How Far Are We From Human-Like Motivational Reasoning in Large Language Models?
Xixian Yong, Jianxun Lian, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xiao Zhou*, Xing Xie
The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 25)
Hypertension Risk Screening based on Longitudinal Photoplethysmogram and Ballistocardiograph Using Smart Watch
Guangpu Zhu, Xiaoyu Li, Xin Sui, Jie Hawes, Ramy Hussein, Qian Hong, Xiao Zhou, Zijing Zeng, Yelei Li
The 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 25)
Tricolore: Multi-Behavior User Profiling for Enhanced Candidate Generation in Recommender Systems
Xiao Zhou*, Zhongxiang Zhao, Hanze Guo
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE 2025)
Leave No One Behind: Enhancing Diversity While Maintaining Accuracy in Social Recommendation
Lei Li, Xiao Zhou*
The 30th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 25)
CureGraph: Contrastive Multi-Modal Graph Representation Learning for Urban Living Circle Health Profiling and Prediction
Jinlin Li, Xiao Zhou*
Artificial Intelligence (AIJ 2025)
MotifGPL: Motif-Enhanced Graph Prototype Learning for Deciphering Urban Social Segregation
Tengfei He, Xiao Zhou*
In Proceedings of the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 25)
FAP-CD: Fairness-Driven Age-Friendly Community Planning via Conditional Diffusion Generation
Jinlin Li, Xintong Li (本科生), Xiao Zhou*
In Proceedings of the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 25)
2024
CGAP: Urban Region Representation Learning with Coarsened Graph Attention Pooling
Zhuo Xu, Xiao Zhou*.
In Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024)
MuseCL: Predicting Urban Socioeconomic Indicators via Multi-Semantic Contrastive Learning
Xixian Yong, Xiao Zhou*.
In Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024)
Tail-STEAK: Improve Friend Recommendation for Tail Users via Self-Training Enhanced Knowledge Distillation
Yijun Ma, Chaozhuo Li, Xiao Zhou*.
In Proceedings of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 24)
Ada-Retrieval: An Adaptive Multi-Round Retrieval Paradigm for Sequential Recommendations
Lei Li, Jianxun Lian, Xiao Zhou*, Xing Xie.
In Proceedings of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024)
Causally Aware Generative Adversarial Networks for Light Pollution Control
Yuyao Zhang (本科生), Ke Guo (本科生), Xiao Zhou*.
In Proceedings of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 24)
2023
M2EU: Meta Learning for Cold-start Recommendation via Enhancing User Preference Estimation.
Zhenchao Wu, Xiao Zhou*.
In Proceedings of 46th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 23)
Reconstructing Human Activities via Coupling Mobile Phone Data with Location-based Social Networks
Le Huang, Fan Xia, Hui Chen, Bowen Hu, Xiao Zhou, Chunxiao Li, Yaohui Jin, Yanyan Xu.
Travel Behaviour and Society (2023)
Phase-wise Evaluation and Optimization of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions to Contain the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US
Xiao Zhou*, Xiaohu Zhang, Paolo Santi, Carlo Ratti.
Frontiers in Public Health (2023)
2022
Personalized Query Suggestion with Searching Dynamic Flow for Online Recruitment
Zile Zhou#, Xiao Zhou#, Mingzhe Li, Yang Song, Tao Zhang, Rui Yan.
In Proceedings of 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (CIKM 22)
2019
Topic-Enhanced Memory Networks for Personalised Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Xiao Zhou*, Cecilia Mascolo, Zhongxiang Zhao.
In Proceedings of ACM Int. Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data (KDD 2019).
Collaborative Metric Learning with Memory Network for Multi-Relational Recommender Systems
Xiao Zhou*, Danyang Liu, Jianxun Lian, Xing Xie.
In Proceedings of 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2019).
2018
Predicting the Spatio-Temporal Evolution of Chronic Diseases in Population with Human Mobility Data
Yingzi Wang, Xiao Zhou, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, Xing Xie, Enhong Chen.
In Proceedings of 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018).
Discovering Latent Patterns of Urban Cultural Interactions in WeChat for Modern City Planning
Xiao Zhou*, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, Zhongxiang Zhao.
In Proceedings of ACM Int. Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data (KDD 2018).
2017
Detecting Socio-Economic Impact of Cultural Investment through Geo-Social Network Analysis
Xiao Zhou*, DesislavaHristova, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo.
In Proceedings of 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017).
Cultural Investment and Urban Socio-Economic Development: A Geo-Social Network Approach
Xiao Zhou*, Desislava Hristova, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, Max Sklar.
Royal Society open science4.9 (2017): 170413.
2016
Evaluating the Impact of the 2012 Olympic Games Policy on the Regeneration of East London Using Spatio-Temporal Big Data
Xiao Zhou*, Desislava Hristova, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo.
In Proceedings ofInternational Conference on Frontiers of Data Science for Government: Ideas, Practices, and Projections (Data for Policy 2016).
2014
Conservation and Utilisation of Revolutionary Sites Based on Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Analysis
Xiao Zhou, Shuyuan Li, Huiwen He, Ming Lu.
(in Chinese). In Proceedings of Annual National Planning Conference 2014.

Services

  • Executive Member of Ubiquitous Computing Committee at China Computer Federation (CCF)
  • SPC/PC/Reviewer: Nature Communications; TheWebConf; KDD; NeurIPS; ICLR; MM; AAAI; IJCAI; RecSys; PAKDD; TKDE; TIST.

Contact

Tel：

Email：xiaozhou@ruc.edu.cn

Website：https://xiaozhoucam.github.io/

Address：