Dr Xiaorui Jiang

BSc, MSc, PhD, PGCHE

Information School

Lecturer in Data Science

Xiaorui Jiang Staff Photo
Profile picture of Xiaorui Jiang Staff Photo
xiaorui.jiang@sheffield.ac.uk
Room C228, The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Xiaorui Jiang
Information School
Room C228
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
Profile

My first official academic appointment started as a Lecturer in Intelligent Systems in the School of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology (ZJUT), China in 2013, where I was responsible for deputy-leading a big data visual analytics team for a series of smart city R&D projects in China. I assisted the head of the team in securing more than 3.5M government funding and 5M paired industrial investment (both in CNY) in intelligently. Apart from the leadership, I was allowed to enjoy a portion of relatively quiet time in my personal scientific pursuit in scientific literature and network analysis, which began during my PhD studies at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In this direction, I was funded by the National and Provincial Natural Science Foundations on heterogeneous academic network analysis. In addition to teaching on undergraduate modules about programming languages and data structures, I was also involved in creating a series of new modules about big data visualization and visual analytics for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. In 2015, I was offered the Excellent Researcher Award of Zhejiang University of Technology. 

Since then, my entire academic career can be described as centred around data science education and research. In 2016, I moved to the Department of Computer Science in Aston University, where I created the Advanced DataBase Systems module and made significant contributions to the Rolls Royce Data Science Programme and the degree apprenticeship programmes. I also worked on a few projects which focused on helping SMEs to build or grow their business using data science concepts and techniques. Since Dec 2019, I started to focus more on Natural Language Processing (NLP) when shortly working as a Senior Researcher in NLP at the National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies in Japan. In September 2020, I joined the Centre for Computational Sciences and Mathematical Modelling at Coventry University, where I lead cross-disciplinary research in NLP and created the Natural Language Processing module. In 2023 I was nominated for the Outstanding Supervisor Award, and in 2024 I won the Academic Staff of the Year Award of the College of Engineering, Environment and Science, for the recognition of my contributions to improving student experience.

In May 2023, I joined the Information School of the University of Sheffield as a Lecturer in Data Science. I will teach on both undergraduate and postgraduate data science programmes. Recently, my main research mainly falls into three major areas which either align to or enhance the existing research groups in the Information School: (1) NLP and Network Analysis for Science and Academia (e.g., scientific text mining, scientometrics, metascience, research on research), which I expect to expand and grow significantly through collaboration in the Information School; (2) NLP for Healthcare/Biomedical Informatics (e.g., evidence-based medicine, NLP solutions for primary care), which I expect to establish cross-department collaboration within the university of Sheffield; (3) NLP and Network Analysis for Law, a field I am gradually developing in collaboration with the Law and Tech Lab in Maastricht University, the Netherlands, initially funded by the Royal Society International Exchange Scheme. In addition to the above, I am open to, have been worked on or been working on NLP applications in digital humanities, media, and business, among others (e.g., historical/literary text mining, multimodal sport video analysis, technology acceptance analysis, and so on).  

Qualifications

Bachelor/Master of Engineering in Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, China, 2005/2007

Doctor of Engineering in Computer Science, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, 2013

Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Aston University, UK, 2018

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2019

Research interests

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

  • Natural language processing and machine learning for mining biomedical publications and (semi-)automating systematic literature review
  • Natural language processing and network analytics for understanding science (scientific text mining and citation network analysis) and improving scientific research (meta-science or research on research)
  • Natural language processing and machine learning for improving the healthcare services in the primary and secondary care settings, e.g., clinical text classification, clinical information extraction, algorithmic clinical coding, etc.
  • Natural language processing and network analytics for legal informatics applications, such as legal citation network analysis and text mining of legal documents (cases, contracts, T&C, privacy notices)
  • Big data analytics and (multi-modal) natural language processing for solving real-world problems of social sciences, humanities and arts, such as digital inclusiveness, digital vulnerability, digital humanities, AI-assisted survey, multi-modal sport video summarisation, and so on. 
Publications

Journal articles

Chapters

Conference proceedings papers

Preprints

Teaching interests

I am interested in teaching the following subjects: Natural language processing, text mining, machine learning, data mining and databases, data structure and algorithms, or other data science-related modules.

I am also keen on supervising postgraduate dissertation projects in machine learning for text and scientometric/bibliometric analysis, wishing to collaborate with motivated PG students to embark on their journeys into interesting topics of research.

Teaching activities

INF217, Databases and beyond, Data Science BSc, Module coordinator

INF216, Responsible Data Science Lab 1, Data Science BSc, Module contributor

INF319, Responsible Data Science Lab 2

INF6050, Database Design 

Professional activities and memberships

I am a lifetime member of the International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics, a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics

I am an active reviewer for the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Informetrics, and Scientometrics