Biography

I'm a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, and also work as a part-time Senior Researcher in Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.

Before that, I was a full-time Senior Researcher at Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford (in the group of Prof. Ian Horrocks), and worked very shortly as a PostDoctoral Researcher in GIScience in Heidelberg University. My Ph.D in Computer Science and Technology was awarded in Zhejiang University in 2016 for the research on learning and reasoning for spatio-temporal data, and my Bachelor degree in Computer Science and Technology was awarded in Zhejiang University as well in 2011. I was a visiting student of Department of Informatics, Zurich University from 2014 to 2015.

Research Interests

• Neural-symbolic Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: the embedding, inference, construction and curation of knowledge graphs and OWL ontologies.
• Language Model and Data Intensive Systems: augmenting large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs, ontologies and data lakes; retrieval augmented generation (RAG); natural language inference.
• Machine Learning: knowledge-aware zero-shot, few-shot and transfer learning; knowledge graph and ontology embedding.

Research Grants and Projects

• 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.
• EPSRC New Investigator Award "OntoEm: Semantic Embeddings for Ontologies" (EP/Y017706/1), 427.9K GBP, 12/2023 - 11/2026, 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.
• EPSRC "ConCur: Knowledge Graph Construction and Curation" (EP/V050869/1), 1.1M GBP, 12/2021 - 11/2024, Research Co-Investigator (PI: Ian Horrocks).
• As a researcher, I'm also working on the e-commerce taxonomy curation projection funded by eBay in University of Oxford, and have finished working for several knowledge graph related projects such as the AIDA project of the Alan Turing Institute, and the knowledge graph construction project funded by Samsung Research UK.

      I am recruiting PhD students in UoM. Please email your CV to me or directly apply my projects on our website.

Academic Services and Activities

• Member of AMS Network on Neurosymbolic AI for Medicine (2024 - )
• Membership of EPSRC Peer Review College (2023 - )
• Associate Editor of Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK) (2023 - ).
• Co-organiser of the OAEI Track "Bio-ML: A ML-friendly Biomedical track for Equivalence and Subsumption Matching" in ISWC (2022 - ).
• Editor Board of Journal of Web Semantics (2020 - 2023).
• Co-organiser of SemTab: Semantic Web Challenge on Tabular Data to Knowledge Graph Matching which is in conjunction with International Semantic Web Conference (2019 - 2023).
• Co-chair of Semantic Web Challenge Chair of ISWC'21.
• PC/SPC of ISWC, The Web Conference (WWW), AAAI, IJCAI, ESWC, CIKM, ACL, etc.

      See my CV for more I have served.

Industrial Activities

• Associate member of SIRIUS Centre for Scalable Data Access in Norway. (11/2017 - 12/2023)
• Consultant on knowledge graph construction (in collaboration with Xi Chen), Jarvis Lab of Tencent Technology, Shenzhen, China. (03/2020 - 02/2021)
• Consultant, Oxford Semantic Technology, Oxford, UK. (12/2019 - 02/2020)
• Enterprise Fellow of MPLS Division of University of Oxford. (10/2019 - 09/2020)

Publications

      Google Scholar, DBLP, Selected

Invited Talks and Tutorials

     Selected

Softwares

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

Teaching

• "Neural-symbolic Knowledge Representation and Reasoning". 2nd European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (ESSAI). Athens, Greece. July 2024.
• "Data Engineering (COMP60711)". Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. 2024-2025.
• "Querying Data on the Web (COMP62421)". Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. 2023-2024, 2024-2025.
• "Knowledge Graph (English)". Southeast University. Guest Lecture. Summer 2023.
• "Artificial Intelligence". Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. Group Class Teaching. Hilary Term 2022.
• "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (English)". Southeast University. Guest Lecture. 2021-2022, 2022-2023.
• "Augmenting Machine Learning with Knowledge Base", University of Aberdeen, 01/2018 (Guest Lecture to CS551J Knowledge Representation and Reasoning)

Research Supervision

• Hui Yang (Postdoctoral, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 06/2024 - )
• Ian Hyland (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 04/2024 - )
• Yiping Song (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 04/2024 - )
• Zhenyu Wu (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 09/2022 - )
• Tianzhe Zhao (Visiting PhD from Xi'an Jiaotong University, 01/2024 - )
• Jingchuan Shi (PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2021 - )


• 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)