Dr. Xiao Hu is an Associate Professor in the Human Communication, Development and Information Science (CDIS) Academic Unit in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests are applications of data mining and machine learning in the domains of Information, Education and Culture, including big data in education, learning analytics, teachable AI, music information retrieval, affective computing and social data science. Dr. Hu is also the program director for Bachelor of Arts and Science (BASc) in Social Data Science program. She has the principal investigator of research projects funded by the Research Grant Council (RGC) of the Hong Kong S. A. R. and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Dr. Hu is also a co-investigator of a Theme-based Research Scheme project titled “Learning and Assessment for Digital Citizenship”, also funded by the RGC and an intergenerational learning and reading project funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

Dr. Hu has won multiple awards in international conferences and her teaching is recognized by a UGC team teaching award (2019). Dr. Hu is the coordinating co-chair of Big Data in Education and Learning Analytics (BDELA) track in the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT) (2021, 2022). She has also been a board member of The International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) (2011-2017) and The Society of International Chinese in Educational Technology (SICET) (2018 to 2021). Dr. Hu currently serves in the editorial boards of five international journals. She was invited to visit the Institute for Neural Computation in University of California at San Diego in 2019, supported by the HKU Oversea Fellowship, Graduate Program of Informatics, Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Brazil (2018), School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, U.S.A (2016), Academic Sinica, Taiwan (2016), and National Institute of Informatics, Japan (2011). She has given seminars in a number of oversea institutions such as Oxford University, Indiana University, West Kentucky University, Dunhuang Research Academy, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Dr. Hu holds a PhD degree in Library and Information Science, Multi-disciplinary Certificate in Language and Speech Processing, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Information Systems from Wuhan University.