Huizhi Liang, Elly

Fellow of The Higher Education Academy (HEA), UK

• Employment

Senior Lecturer (equiv. Associate Professor in US), Newcastle University, UK, 2022-

Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor in US), University of Reading, Reading, UK, 2017-2021

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, LIP6, Paris, France, 2016 – 2017

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia, 2014 – 2016

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ANU, Canberra, Australia, 2012 – 2014

• Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Web Intelligence and Data Mining Group, QUT, Australia, 08/2007 – 05/2011

• Awards & Honours

1. Collaborative Innovation Fund- Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and University of Reading project entitled Improving preoperative diagnosis of thyroid nodules by developing ultrasound artificial intelligence (AI) decision support system. 1/1/2021-30/6/2022 (PI)
2. EIT Food/Horizon2020 project entitled Developing a Digital Toolkit to Enhance the Communication of Scientific Health Claims (Co-I, Project in total €495,204 for phase 1, €708,622.00 for phase 2, €466,000 for phase 3) 2019-2021
3. University’s Endowment Funds Award, University of Reading, 2018
4. BCS Academy New Appointments Grant, 2018
5. Teijin fund for research visiting of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan, September, 2016
6. Ranked the 3rd out of 34 teams world wide on SemEval-2016 Sentiment Analysis Tasks 4A and 4B. (Team leader), 2016
7. Vice Chancellor’s Grant of ANU, for research visiting of early career academic staffs, 2012
8. Nominee of University Outstanding Thesis Award, QUT, March 2011
9. Write-up Scholarship of QUT, Australia, November 2010 – February 2011, for publication writing
10. Cloud Computing Internship (one of the 3 winners out of 23 applications of Australia),  ATSE, 2010
11. Student Travel Grant (AD$5,000, one of the 3 winners of Australia) of Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), Australia, May 2010, for 1) World Wide Web conference trip (Raleigh, USA) 2) SIAM Data Mining conference trip (Columbus, USA)
12. Student Travel Award of SIGWEB, USA, June 2010, for Hypertext conference trip (Toronto, Canada)
13. Student Travel Award of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), USA, May 2010, for SIAM Data Mining conference trip (Columbus, USA)
14. Grant-in-Aid of Queensland University of Technology, Australia, September 2009, for Web Intelligence conference trip (Milan, Italy)
15. Student Travel Award of Australian Research Council Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet), Australia, June 2007, for attending HCSNet Summer Fest’07 (Sydney, Australia)

• Community Services

1. Chair of Industry Advisory Board, Department of Computer Science, University of Reading, 2021
2. Chair of Student Staff Liaison Committee, Department of Computer Science, University of Reading, 2018, 2019, 2020
3. PC member of AAAI 2018, 2019, 2020; IJCAI 2018, 2019, 2020; KDD 2021.
4. Reader (Research proposal reviewer) of L’Oréal UNESCO For Women in Science 2020 Rising Talent Programme.
5. Guest editor of IEEE ACCESS special issue “Advanced Data Mining Methods for Social Computing”, 2019
6. Reviewer of Information Retrieval Journal, Information Systems, IEEE Access.
7. Co-organiser of BCS open source AI workshop 2019
8. Founder of  Data Science Club and Organiser of Data Science Hackathon event of University of Reading, 2019.
9. Local walk leader of Oxford University Walking Club 2019, 2020, 2021.
10. Session Chair of CIKM 2015, PC member of The Australasian Data Mining Conference 2012, 2013, 2014
11. Early Career Researcher (NECTER) college contact of The Research School of Computer Science, ANU, 2013

• Other Presentations

1. Representation Learning for Recommender Systems, AIST, Japan, 2016.
2. User Profiling in Web 2.0 for Recommender Systems & Real-time Similarity Search, visiting talk, Tsinghua University, China, July, 2012; Deakin university, Australia, Dec, 2012
3. A PhD is Not Enough–Life Beyond PhD, invited talk of HDR Training Workshop of CSD HDR Consortium, QUT, Nov, 2011 (PPT)
4. Piled Higher Deeper–Life of A Current Research Student, invited talk of “Research Talent” Information Session of Faculty of Science and Technology, for undergraduate students, QUT, Oct, 2010

• Research Visit

1. Professor Alison Noble, Oxford University, September 2021
2. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan, September 2016
3. Summer School of Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, August 2016
4. Tensent Shenzhen, China, May 2016

• Internship Project

Project Title: Paralleled User Profiling in Web 2.0 Using MapReduce (PDF|IEEE), Jan-March 2010 (one of the 3 winners out of 23 applications of Australia)

Sponsor: Intern of HPC Group of QUT, sponsored by Cloud Computing Internship and Competition Project of ATSE

Supervisor: A/Prof. Jim Hogan

Abstract: This Project implemented an efficient parallel user profiling approach and a scalable recommender system. The current advanced cloud computing techniques such as Hadoop, MapReduce, and Cascading were used. The experiments were conducted on Amazon EC2 Elastic MapReduce clouds and S3 with a real world large scaled dataset from Del.icio.us website.

•  Doctoral Research

Thesis Title: User Profiling based on Folksonomy Information in Web 2.0 for Personalized Recommender Systems (PDF)

Supervisors: A/Prof. Yue Xu, Prof.Yuefeng Li and A/Prof. Richi Nayak

Citation: This thesis proposed novel approaches to use the emerging user information in Web 2.0 to help users solve the information overload issue. The user created content description and classification information–Folksonomy was used to find users’ interests. Based on users’ interest profiles, personalized recommendations can be generated for each user. This thesis contributes to effectively use the wisdom of crowds to provide more accurate user profiling and recommendation approaches.