Genuis only means hard-working all one’s life.
–Mendeleyev
Hi there 🤗! My name is Tong, 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.
🎯 Research
My research focuses on human-centric time series 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.
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
• 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.