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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 PI

(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) End-to-End Large Recommendation Model Research for Near-Field Content Distribution Scenarios Kuaishou 2025.12 – 2026.11 PI

(2) Research on Embodied Intelligence Visual Question Answering Model Shenhan Technology 2025.12 – 2026.11 PI

(3) Exploration and Application of Large Models for Search Behavior Kuaishou 2025.09 – 2026.08 PI

(4) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Models with Domain Knowledge Awareness (Sub-project) Yunnan Provincial Department of Science and Technology 2025.01 – 2027.12 PI of Sub-project

(5) Research on Hallucination and Editing Algorithms for Industry Foundation Models Tencent 2024.12 – 2025.11 PI

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

(7) Game Recommendation System China Unicom 2021.08 – 2022.03 PI

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

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

Publications

IJCAI24-MuseCL: Predicting Urban Socioeconomic Indicators via Multi-Semantic Contrastive Learning

 DEMO

AIJ25-CureGraph: Contrastive Multi-Modal Graph Representation Learning for Urban Living Circle Health Pro­filing and Prediction 

 DEMO

AAAI24-Causally Aware Generative Adversarial Networks for Light Pollution Control 

 DEMO

 NeurIPS25-Think or Not? Exploring Thinking Efficiency in Large Reasoning Models via an Information-Theoretic Lens



 NeurIPS25-Counterfactual Reasoning for Steerable Pluralistic Value Alignment of Large Language Models



AAAI26-Lost in Time? A Meta-Learning Framework for Time-Shift-Tolerant Physiological Signal Transformation



AAAI26-Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models



KDD18-Discovering Latent Patterns of Urban Cultural Interactions in WeChat for Modern City Planning


KDD19-Topic-Enhanced Memory Networks for Personalised Point-of-Interest Recommendation 


PUBLICATIONS

2026
HypeMed: Enhancing Medication Recommendations with Hypergraph-Based Patient Relationships
Xiangxu Zhang, Xiao Zhou*, Hongteng Xu, Jianxun Lian
The ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 2026)
From Retrieval to Generation: Unifying External and Parametric Knowledge for Medical Question Answering
Lei Li, Xiao Zhou*, Yingying Zhang, Xian Wu*
The ACM on Web Conference 2026 (WWW'26)
WED-Net: A Weather-Effect Disentanglement Network with Causal Augmentation for Urban Flow Prediction
Qian Hong, Siyuan Chang (本科生), Xiao Zhou*
The ACM on Web Conference 2026 (WWW'26)
Intelli-Planner: Towards Customized Urban Planning via Large Language Model Empowered Reinforcement Learning
Xixian Yong, Peilin Sun, Zihe Wang, Xiao Zhou*
The ACM on Web Conference 2026 (WWW'26)
Why not Collaborative Filtering in Dual View? Bridging Sparse and Dense Models
Hanze Guo, Jianxun Lian, Xiao Zhou*
The ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 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*
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025 (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
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 (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'24)
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'24)
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'24)
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 the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD'19).
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'19).
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'18).
Discovering Latent Patterns of Urban Cultural Interactions in WeChat for Modern City Planning
Xiao Zhou*, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, Zhongxiang Zhao.
In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD'18).
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'17).
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 of International 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：Zhongguancun Ave. 59, Haidian District, Beijing, China