Dr. Sihong Xie is currently a tenured Associated Professor at HKUST (GZ). He obtained his Ph.D. degree from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Before joining HKUST (GZ), he was an Assistant Professor at CSE department of Lehigh University in the USA and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. His research focused on accountable machine learning, data-centric machine learning, safe reinforcement learning and its application in robotics. He has published over 70 papers on top conferences and journals such as ICLR, KDD, UAI, ICDM, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI, WSDM, SDM, and TKDE with a total of over 2500 citations (h-index 19). He was a PI for over 1 million US dollars from NSF in the USA, and was awarded the NSF CAREER Award. He serves as a panelist at NSF, and PC/senior PC member/reviewers of NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, AAAI, ICDM, SIGIR, SDM, JAIR, and TPAMI.

• Accountable machine learning: explainability, fairness，robustness, privacy and security
• Knowledge-intensive LLM
• Physics-informed ML and causal inference
• Constrained reinforcement learning with application on robotics
• Multi-modal/federated learning, generative models, with applications on healthcare

• We aim at publications on top conferences and journals of machine learning, data mining, and AI.
• Systematic academic training in a collaborative environment: each student meets the advisor at least once per week, and a weekly group meeting for both capturing the latest trend in AI research and building a solid foundation in machine learning, optimization, statistics, etc., in a systematic way. Collaboration among students and other scholars is highly encouraged to inspire more creativity. We respect each student's research interest within a general scope.
• Methodology of research: we will train a student to be an independent investigator, through proposal preparation, student advising, teaching, giving presentations, etc..
• Networking: students can visit other universities and research labs (Tencent, Pengcheng, Huawei, etc.) to enrich their collaboration networks and prepare themselves for a successful career.

• Multiple Ph.D. positions to start from 2024 and 2025 to conduct research in the above areas.
• Multiple research assistant and internship positions. The positions are paid according to experience and progress. Opportunities for publishing papers on top venues, and outstanding students will have higher priority for Ph.D. admission

• Curiosity-driven: strong curiosity in AI, particularly the underlying deep and fundamental principles and how they are implementated.
• Results-oriented: grounded in codes, data, and experimental results.
• Well-planned: have a mature understanding and planning of the life during and after Ph.D.
• Relevant background: strong in calculus (analysis), probability and statistics, linear algebra, and programming. Internship experience in top companies or research group with tangible results are preferred.
• Language: English fluency meets the standard of postgraduate admission at HKUST-GZ (refer to the application entry)

Please email the following to sihongxie@hkust-gz.edu.cn with title: Prospective Student – name – expected starting date, such as 2024 Fall):

• Resume
• Published or submitted papers; open-sourced codes/demo of projects
• Research experience
• Research statement
• Transcripts

Application entry