Biography

I'm a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, and a part-time Senior Researcher in Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. Before that, I was a full-time Senior Researcher in University of Oxford (with Prof. Ian Horrocks), and worked shortly as a postdoctoral in Heidelberg University. My PhD and bachelor degree were both awarded in Zhejiang University on Computer Science and Technology. I was a visiting PhD student of Department of Informatics, Zurich University from 2014 to 2015.

Latest News!

• 09/01/2025: Visit Southeast University
• 11/11/2024: Attend EMNLP'24
• 31/10/2024: Visit University of Stuttgart for invited talk
• 25/09/2024: Two papers accepted in NeurIPS'24

Research Interests

• Knowledge Representation: construction and curation of knowledge graphs and ontologies.
• Language Model and Data Intensive Systems: augmenting large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs, ontologies and data lakes, retrieval augmented generation.
• Machine Learning: knowledge representation learning, neural-symbolic reasoning.

      I am recruiting PhD students of these topics in UoM. Please email me if you have interests.

Current Research Grants and Projects

• EPSRC New Investigator Award "OntoEm: Semantic Embeddings for Ontologies" (EP/Y017706/1), 427.9K GBP, 12/2023 - 11/2026, PI.
• EPSRC "ConCur: Knowledge Graph Construction and Curation" (EP/V050869/1), 1.1M GBP, 12/2021 - 05/2025, Research Co-Investigator.
• The Manchester-Melbourne-Toronto (MMT) Research Fund, "AI-Driven Solutions for Child Protection: Utilizing LLMs and Knowledge Graph" (collaborative research initiatives), 9K GBP + 14K CAD, 10/2024 - 03/2026, PI with Jia Xue from University of Toronto.
• Turing Innovation Catalyst Manchester (TICM) funded Collaborative R&D Project "Multi-modal Semantic Search with Ontologies and Modern AI Techniques", 30.6K GBP, 07/2024 - 01/2025, PI.

Current Services

• Associate Editor of Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK) (2023 - ).
• Editor Board of Data Intelligence (2021 - ).
• Membership of EPSRC Peer Review College (2023 - )
• Member of AMS Network on Neurosymbolic AI for Medicine (2024 - )
• Co-organiser of the OAEI Track Bio-ML in ISWC (2022 - 2024).
• PC/SPC of ISWC, The Web Conference (WWW), and some NLP/AI conferences.
• Selective review of grant proposals and journal papers.

Publications

      Google Scholar, DBLP, Selected

Invited Talks and Tutorials

• Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models for Advancing Scientific Research. Tutorial at Learning on Graph Conference (LoG), 26/11/2024. Slides
• Data Intensive Question Answering with Large Language Models. Invited Talk at University of Stuttgart. 31/10/2024. Slides
• Knowledge Engineering meets (Large) Language Models. Amazon Search Research Talk Series. 12/07/2024. Slides
• Neural-symbolic Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with Ontology and Knowledge Graph Embeddings. Seminar at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), 04/2024. Slides
• Knowledge-aware Zero-shot Learning (K-ZSL): Concepts, Methods and Resources. Tutorial in IJCAI 2023 (August 19 - 25).

      See CV for a complete list

Software

• OWL2Vec* (an OWL ontology embedding framework)
• DeepOnto (a library for ontology engineering with language models and machine learning)

Current Teaching

• "Data Engineering Techniques". Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. New unit under development. 2025-2026.
• "Advanced Topics in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning". Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. New unit under development. 2025-2026.
• "Data Engineering (COMP60711)". Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. 2024-2025.
• "Querying Data on the Web (COMP62421)". Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. 2023-2024, 2024-2025.

Current Research Students / Associates (Team)

• Hui Yang (Postdoctoral, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 06/2024 - )
• Hanhua Hong (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 09/2024 - )
• Yiping Song (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 04/2024 - )
• Ian Hyland (half-time PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 04/2024 - )
• Balazs Mosolygo (PhD, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, 11/2023 - ) (external co-supervisor)
• Zhenyu Wu (PhD, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 09/2022 - )
• Tianzhe Zhao (Visiting PhD from Xi'an Jiaotong University, 01/2024 - )

Past Research Students / Associates

• Yuan He (PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2020 - 2024)
• Yuxia Geng (PhD, College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 2018 - 2023)
• Erik Bryhn Myklebust (PhD, NIVA & SIRIUS, University of OSLO, 2019 - 2022) (external co-supervisor)
• Mathias Jackermeier (MSc, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 2022)
• Yan Zhou (MSc, GIScience, University of Heidelberg, 2016 - 2017)