Biography

I joined the Computer Science department in The University of Manchester in 11/2022 as a teaching and research Lecturer (as Assistant Professor), and will be a Senior Lecturer (as Associate Professor) from August 2025. Before that, I was a Senior Researcher in University of Oxford (with Prof. Ian Horrocks), and worked shortly as a postdoctoral in Heidelberg University. My PhD and bachelor degree were both awarded in Zhejiang University on Computer Science and Technology. I was a visiting PhD student of Department of Informatics, Zurich University from 2014 to 2015.

Latest News!

• 31 Jul - 08 Aug: visit University of Toronto, attend KDD 2025
• 20 Jul: attend ICDCS 2025 in Glasgow
• 01/06/2025: attend ESWC 2025

Research Interests

• Knowledge Representation: construction and curation of knowledge graphs and ontologies, semantic techniques.
• Machine Learning: knowledge representation learning, semantic embedding, neural-symbolic integration.
• Data and Knowledge Management for AI: evaluating and augmenting large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs, ontologies and structured data.

      Please email me if you have interests in the following PhD projects RAG project, LLM explanability and evaluation project, or other topics.

Research Grants

• EPSRC New Investigator Award "OntoEm: Semantic Embeddings for Ontologies" (EP/Y017706/1), 427.9K GBP, 12/2023 - 11/2026, PI.
• The Manchester-Melbourne-Toronto (MMT) Research Fund, "AI-Driven Solutions for Child Protection: Utilizing LLMs and Knowledge Graph" (collaborative research initiatives), 9K GBP + 14K CAD, 10/2024 - 03/2026, PI with Jia Xue from University of Toronto.
• EPSRC "ConCur: Knowledge Graph Construction and Curation" (EP/V050869/1), 1.1M GBP, 12/2021 - 05/2025, Research Co-Investigator.
• Turing Innovation Catalyst Manchester (TICM) funded Collaborative R&D Project "Multi-modal Semantic Search with Ontologies and Modern AI Techniques", 30.6K GBP, 07/2024 - 01/2025, PI.
• Turing-Manchester Feasibility Project "Knowledge Graph for Explainability, Guidance and Human-in-the-loop in Machine Learning", 19K GBP, 11/2022 - 04/2023, PI.

Recent Services

• Associate Editor of Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK) (2023 - ).
• Editor Board of Data Intelligence (2021 - ).
• Membership of EPSRC Peer Review College (2023 - )
• Co-organiser of the OAEI Track Bio-ML in ISWC (2022 - ).
• PC/SPC/Area Chair of ISWC, The Web Conference, NeurIPS, ARR, etc.
• Regular proposal reviewer for main research grant bodies in the UK and EU like ERC, DFG and NWO.

Publications

      Google Scholar, DBLP, Selected

Selective Invited Talks and Tutorials

• Ontology Embedding and Construction in the Large Language Model Era. Invited Talk in Southeast University, Nanjing. 10/01/2025. Slides
• Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models for Advancing Scientific Research. Tutorial at Learning on Graph Conference (LoG), 26/11/2024. Slides
• Data Intensive Question Answering with Large Language Models. Invited Talk at University of Stuttgart. 31/10/2024. Slides
• Knowledge Engineering meets (Large) Language Models. Amazon Search Research Talk Series. 12/07/2024. Slides
• Neural-symbolic Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with Ontology and Knowledge Graph Embeddings. Seminar at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), 04/2024. Slides
• Knowledge-aware Zero-shot Learning (K-ZSL): Concepts, Methods and Resources. Tutorial in IJCAI 2023 (August 19 - 25).

Software

• OWL2Vec* (an OWL ontology embedding framework)
• DeepOnto (a library for ontology engineering with language models and machine learning)

Teaching in Manchester

• "Data Engineering Technologies (COMP63502)". 2025-2026.
• "Advanced Topics in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (COMP64602)". 2025-2026.
• "Data Engineering (COMP60711)". 2024-2025.
• "Querying Data on the Web (COMP62421)". 2023-2024, 2024-2025.

Current Research Students / Associates (Team)

• Hui Yang (Postdoctoral, 06/2024 - )
• Hira Beril Kucuk (PhD, 04/2025 - )
• Hanhua Hong (PhD, 09/2024 - )
• Yiping Song (PhD, 04/2024 - )
• Ian Hyland (half-time PhD, 04/2024 - )
• Zhenyu Wu (PhD, 09/2022 - )


• Tianzhe Zhao (visiting PhD from Xi'an Jiaotong University, 01/2024 - )
• Balazs Mosolygo (externally co-supervised PhD, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, 11/2023 - )

Past Research Students / Associates

• Yuan He (PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2020 - 2024)
• Yuxia Geng (PhD, College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 2018 - 2023)
• Erik Bryhn Myklebust (PhD, NIVA & SIRIUS, University of OSLO, 2019 - 2022) (external co-supervisor)
• Mathias Jackermeier (MSc, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2022)
• Yan Zhou (MSc, GIScience, University of Heidelberg, 2016 - 2017)