Biography

Jiaoyan is a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor) in Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. Before that, he was a Lecturer in Manchester from 2022, a Senior Researcher in Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford from 2017 (with Prof. Ian Horrocks), and a postdoctoral in Heidelberg University. Jiaoyan got his PhD and bachelor degrees both in Zhejiang University on Computer Science and Technology. He was a visiting PhD in Department of Informatics, Zurich University from 2014 to 2015.

News!

• 25-29 Oct: Attend ISWC'26 in Bari, Italy
• 20 July: Our table repository schema inference paper is accepted by VLDB Journal

Research Interests

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: 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.

PhD / MPhil Recruiting

Drop me an email with your CV and transcripts if you have interests within my research cope. Apologise in advance that I will not be able to respond to all the emails, but only those that are likely to be qualified for a scholarship in our university simply based on my personal assessment (e.g., oversea PhD applicants require outstanding academic performance evidenced by more than one of the following: excellent transcripts, degree from top universities, top publications with key contributions, and outstanding final-year project mark).

Recent Projects / Grants

• EPSRC New Investigator Award "OntoEm: Semantic Embeddings for Ontologies" (EP/Y017706/1), 2024 - 2027, PI.
• The Manchester-Melbourne-Toronto (MMT) Research Fund, "AI-Driven Solutions for Child Protection: Utilizing LLMs and Knowledge Graph" (collaborative research initiatives), 2024 - 2026, PI with Jia Xue from University of Toronto.
• EPSRC "ConCur: Knowledge Graph Construction and Curation" (EP/V050869/1), 2021 - 2025, Research Co-Investigator.
• Turing Innovation Catalyst Manchester (TICM) funded Collaborative R&D Project "Multi-modal Semantic Search with Ontologies and Modern AI Techniques", 2024 - 2025, PI.
• Turing-Manchester Feasibility Project "Knowledge Graph for Explainability, Guidance and Human-in-the-loop in Machine Learning", 2022 - 2023, PI.

Recent Services

• Co-chair of Poster, Demo & Lightning Talk, ISWC 2026.
• Associate Editor of The Knowledge Engineering Review (KER) (2025 - ).
• Associate Editor of Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK) (2023 - ).
• Editor Board of Data Intelligence (2021 - ).
• Co-organiser of the OAEI Track Bio-ML in ISWC (2022 - 2024).
• PC/SPC/Area Chair of ISWC, The Web Conference, ACL ARR, NeurIPS, etc.
• Proposal reviewer for grant bodies including ERC, RAEng, DFG, NWO, etc.

Publications

      Google Scholar, DBLP, Selected

Selective Invited Talks and Tutorials

• OntoLM: Ontology Embedding, Reasoning and Construction with Language Models. Tutorial at ISWC 2026, Bari, Italy. 25/10/2026. Website
• Exploring Large Language Models in Ontology Reasoning and Construction. Invited Talk in PFIA/IC 2026, Arras, France. 2/7/2026. Slides
• Embedding Complex Knowledge: From Geometric to Language Models. Seminar in The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. 3/3/2026. Slides
• Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models for Advancing Scientific Research. Tutorial at ICDCS 2025, Glasgow, UK. 20/07/2025. Slides
• 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, 2026-2027.
• "Advanced Topics in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (COMP64602)". 2025-2026, 2026-2027.
• "Data Engineering (COMP60711)". 2024-2025.
• "Querying Data on the Web (COMP62421)". 2023-2024, 2024-2025.

Current Research Students / Associates

• Hui Yang (Postdoctoral, 06/2024 - )
• Jonathon Dilworth (PhD, 09/2026 - )
• Mai Phuong Dinh (PhD, 04/2026 - )
• Beiyu Xu (PhD, 01/2026 - )
• Hira Beril Kucuk (PhD, 04/2025 - )
• Hanhua Hong (PhD, 09/2024 - )
• Yiping Song (PhD, 04/2024 - )

Past Research Students / Associates

• Zhenyu Wu (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 2022 - 2026)
• Jonathon Dilworth (Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 2025 - 2026)
• Tianzhe Zhao (visiting PhD from Xi'an Jiaotong University, 2024 - 2026)
• Hang Dong (Postdoctoral, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2022 - 2024)
• Yuan He (PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2020 - 2024)
• Melis Kupeli (Research Assistant, Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, 2022 - 2023)
• 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)