Genuis only means hard-working all one’s life.
–Mendeleyev
📢 Annocement: I will be joining the Vanke School of Public Health at Tsinghua University as an Assistant Professor from Fall 2025.
Research in my group will focus on leveraging ubiquitous sensing technologies to advance public health and develop novel AI tools for affordable, large-scale health screening. Our mission is to make healthcare accessible and inclusive—ensuring no one is left behind.
We welcome applications from prospective PhD students, Master’s candidates, and interns. Our lab collaborates closely with leading institutions, including the University of Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard. Interested applicants please email me with CV attached.
🎯 Bio
I am a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, UK, where I got my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Cecilia Mascolo. I received my master’s degree from the Department of Electronics and Engineering, Tsinghua University, China, in 2020, supervised by Prof. Yong Li. Prior to that, I received my bachelor’s degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from Wuhan University, China, in 2017.
My research focuses on human-centric data, particularly sensory data that can be widely collected by mobile and wearable devices, with applications in public health, behavioral understanding, and urban management. Technologically, I specialize in 1) data-efficient machine learning, including self-supervised learning (SSL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs) ; 2) trustworthy deep learning, encompassing uncertainty quantification and privacy-preserving federated learning; and 3) statistical methods, such as clustering analysis, causal inference, and inequality discovery. My passion lies in utilizing AI to build a better future—particularly in healthcare. I aspire for my research to enhance the efficiency, accessibility, and affordability of healthcare services worldwide.
📢 News
• June 30, 2025: This is my last day in office at Cambridge. Everyone are welcome to jpin my farewell dinner tomorrow. • Feb. 2025: I am visiting Beijing Zhongguancun Academy from the 20th to the 28 of February and giving a talk titled Building trustworthy AI for mobile health.
• December 2024: I will be visiting Tsinghua University from the 16th to the 21st of December and giving a talk at the Vanke School of Public Health on the 17th Link.
• October 2024: Our pioneering work on leveraging LLMs for understanding audio and ECGs for healthcare will be presented at the NeurIPS 2024 workshop.
• October 2024: Our work Towards Open Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models: Pretraining and Benchmarking is accepted by Neurips dataset and benchmark track 2024 website!
• September 2024: I have been nominated as a Rising Star in Women in Engineering at the upcoming Asian Dean’s Forum.
• July 2024: I gave a seminar at City University of Hong Kong link.
• Feb. 2024: I gave a guest lecture on Generative AI for mobile health, check from here for slides
🎉 Awards
• 2024, Rising Star in Women in Engineering at the Asian Dean’s Forum, Singapore
• 2023, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad (650 awards globally), UK
• 2022, 2nd POSTER AWARD in Precision Health Initiative Launch Symposium, Cambridge
• 2022, Third Place of lntelligent Medical Track in 2022 World Privacy-Preserving Computing Competition (WPPCC 2022)
• 2022, Best Postgraduate Poster in Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference
• 2022, COVID-19 Sounds project awarded as Better Future Award in Hall of Fame Awards, Cambridge
• 2021, ISCA INTERSPEECH Student Travel Grant
• 2020, Overseas PhD Full Scholarship for 2020-2023
• 2020, Distinguished Master Thesis Award by the Chinese Institute of Electronics
• 2020, Outstanding Research Intern, Tencent, Beijing
• 2019, National Graduate Student Scholarship of China
• 2016, Intel Cup Embedded System Invitational Contest, National Third Prize
• 2014, National Undergraduate Student Scholarship of China
📃 Press
Audio AI for health: Cambridge University (News), (News), (Hall-fame-awards), (News), BBC, The Guardian, The Times, Forbes, EngBio IRC, 新智元, HyperAI超神经, AI TIME 论道
Geoscience and public health: 时空大数据小组, 时空实验室, 数据科学与智能实验室论文解读, 数据科学与智能实验室论文解读
Trustworthy AI: AI TIMER, 智隐数据星图
🚅 Academic Service
I am serving as UbiComp 2022 Posters&Demos session chair.
I am co-organizing Mobile and Wearable Health Seminar Series, University of Cambridge, 2023-2024
I serve as the associate editor of the journal Frontiers in Digital Health (IF 3.2) and the young scientist board of the journal of Medical Data Mining.
I am a reviewer of
• Lancet Regional Health-Europe
• Nature Scientific Data and Scientific Reports
• IEEE TNSM, TMC, TC
• ACM TKDD
• EPJ data science
and I also serve as an SPC for
• AAAI 2020-2024
• UbiComp 2019-2024
• KDD 2019-2024
• IJCAI 2021-2023
• ICASSP 2022-2023
• CHIL 2023-2024
• ML4H 2024
🚀 Teaching
I am also passionate about supervising and I have been a teaching assistant for the following undergraduate courses:
• Artificial Intelligence 2022(Part IB, University of Cambridge)
• Machine Learning & Real-World Data 2022(Part IA, University of Cambridge)
• Foundation of Data Science 2021 (Part IA, University of Cambridge)
• AI Research Project 2021, 2022 (China UK Development Centre, Cambridge Centre for the Integration of Science, Technology and Culture)
• AI in Medicine Project 2021 (China UK Development Centre, Cambridge Centre for the Integration of Science, Technology, and Culture)
📑 Mentoring
I enjoy collaborating with PhD and thesis students, usually as part of an internship in our lab. Here are some recent research projects I supervised:
• Yuwei Evelyn Zhang (University of Cambridge), MPhil dissertation: Exploring uncertainty quantification in federated learning for healthcare, 2022. This student was awarded a commended dissertation award by the department - one of the 4 prizes awarded for dissertations in computer science.
• Alex Wang (University of Cambridge), Part II dissertation: A holistic evaluation of the quality of uncertainty from Bayesian model ensemble in federated learning, 2022
❤️ Non-Academic Services
Since 2021, I have been a committee member of the UK Tsinghua Alumni Association (UKAT). Since 2022, I have been the leader of the publicity team and managed the official UKTA WeChat public account. In late 2023, I officially became the Vice Secretary-General of UKTA.