Xiaowen Chu holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From 2003 onwards, he held successive academic appointments as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2021, he joined The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) as a Full Professor in the Data Science and Analytics (DSA) Thrust. Prof. Chu served as Acting Head of the DSA Thrust from 2023 to 2024 and subsequently as Head of the DSA Thrust from 2024 to 2025. He currently serves as Acting Head of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Thrust.

Sihong Xie is currently an Associate Professor at the Thrust of Artificial Intelligence at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). Previously, Dr. Xie held the position of Assistant Professor from 2016 to 2023 and tenured Associate Professor from 2023 at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, US. From 2019 to 2022, he received over 1.5 million USD in grants from the NSF. Dr. Xie received his Ph.D. in 2016 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on accountable machine learning, where human-ML collaborations are critical. Dr. Xie has published over 60 papers in major data mining and machine learning conferences, such as ICLR, KDD, UAI, ICDM, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI, WSDM, SDM, and TKDE, with over 2,300 citations and an h-index of 19. He has also served as an NSF panelist and PC or senior PC member for conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, AAAI, ICLR, ICDM, and SIGIR, a reviewer for TPAMI, a topic editor of Frontiers in Big Data, and a KDD workshop organizer. In 2022, Dr. Xie was honored with the NSF CAREER Award.

Hao Liu received his Ph.D. degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2017. He is currently an assistant professor at the Artificial Intelligence Thrust, HKUST (Guangzhou), and an Affiliated Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST (Clear Water Bay).

Dr. Liu’s current research interests include spatiotemporal data mining, graph learning, reinforcement learning, and their applications on urban computing, intelligent transportation, and recommender systems.

In the past two years, he has filed over 50 Chinese/U.S. patents and published over 20 research papers at prestigious journals and conferences, such as TKDE, SIGKDD, SIGIR, WebConf, VLDB, AAAI, and IJCAI. He also regularly served as the reviewer and (senior) program committee member of many top-tier journals and conferences, such as IEEE TKDE, IEEE TITS, TRC, ACM SIGKDD, AAAI, and IJCAI. In addition, he is the organizer and questioner of the KDD Cup 2019 Machine Learning competition, which has been well-recognized as the world’s top data science competition in the past twenty years.

Many of his works have been deployed on real-world products and influenced the daily lives of millions of residents in China. For instance, the multi-modal transportation engine he proposed has been deployed on Baidu Maps and has served over five billion routing requests issued by 200 million distinct users from 2019 to 2020. For his research on intelligent transportation and urban computing, he was named in Forbes 30 Under 30 China list for science and healthcare 2021.