Genuis only means hard-working all one’s life.
–Mendeleyev

Hi there! My name is Tong Xia, and 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 leveraging data science and machine learning to advance healthcare applications. It spans two primary areas: (1) developing machine learning models for physiological data to enable intelligent precision medicine, and (2) analyzing and mining large-scale health data to improve public health outcomes at the population level.

Key areas of interest include respiratory audio, ECG, mobility, pandemics, LLMs, foundation models, uncertainty quantification, federated learning, reinforcement learning, and causality.

I am deeply passionate about 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.

News

• 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 pdf Github!
• 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.
• May 2024: Our FLea paper was accepted by KDD 2024. See you in Barcelona!
• May 2024: I recived my PhD degree, and start a new role in Cambridge. I am now a postdoc researcher.
• Feb. 2024: I gave a guest lecture on Generative AI for mobiel health, check from here pdf
• Oct. 2023: Our workshop FairComp at UbiComp2023 was completed with great success!
• July 2023: Congrats to Evelyn - the first MPhil I co-supervised, graduated with distinction and was awarded a commended dissertation award by the department.
• April 2022: Our COVID-19 Sounds team was awarded a “Better Future Award” in Hall of Fame Awards 2021!
• Jan. 2022: Our paper Sounds of COVID-19: exploring realistic performance of audio-based digital testing was accepted by npj Digital Medicine! (IF2021=15.357).
• Oct. 2021: A paper with a large-scale dataset and competitive benchmarks published in NeurIPS 2021 Datasets and Benchmark Track paper.

Awards

• 2023, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, 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

Academic Service

I am a reviewer of
• Lancet Regional Health-Europe, Nature Scientific Data, Nature Scientific Reports, IEEE TNSM, IEEE TMC, 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, ICLR 2024

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

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.

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)