Xiao's Homepage

About Me

I am now a UKRI Smart Data Research Fellow and a Senior Research Associate at Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, working with Prof David Clifton. I am also an honorary researcher at Oxford University Hospital, and a Junior Research Fellow with Kellogg College, Oxford. Previously, I obtained my PhD degree in Computing and MRes degree (Distinction & Dean's Prize) in Medical Robotics and Image Guided Intervention, supervised by Dr Benny Lo and Prof Guang-Zhong Yang CBE FREng. Prior to that, I obtained BEng degree (Honors Student & National Scholarship) in Electronic Engineering from Fudan University in 2018, supervised by Prof Wei Chen. My research interests focus on integrating sensing technolgies (wearable and ambient sensors) and AI (from fundamental signal processing to foundation modeling) for healthcare, to address pressing generalization issues in real-world applications.

Attention I set aside one hour per week to mentoring underrepresented students or anyone looking for guidance. If you're interested, please fill out this form.

[2026-08-29]

Our large-scale analysis of social care records is online at npj Health Systems, in collaboration with Oxfordshire County Council.

[2026-08-29]

Awarded an Early-Career Award at ABCP Annual Conference 2026.

[2026-08-27]

Awarded an Early Translational Fund (Co-I) on a translational study in Nepal.

[2026-08-18]

Gave a talk to the Oura Science Team in London.

[2026-07-30]

Co-hosted a wearables workshop at Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Vietnam.

[2026-06-30]

Awarded a Swiss AI grant (400K GPU hours), led by ETH Zurich.

[2026-05-06]

Elected as Junior Research Fellow of Mansfield College.

[2026-03-30]

Presented as finalist at STEM for Britain, an annual STEM showcase to Parliament.

[2026-02-23]

Our cardiac sensing foundation model paper is live as February cover article of Nature Machine Intelligence, with NIHR Oxford BRC news highlighted.

[2025-12-17]

Awarded a SDR UK Fellowship (PI, £200K) on foundation AI and wearables.

[2025-12-04]

Awarded a MLSTF-ETI fund (PI, £50K) on translational study of biosignal FMs.

[2025-11-19]

Our cardiac sensing foundation model is accepted to Nature Machine Intelligence.

[2025-10-01]

Officially started my fellowship in Kellogg.

[2025-08-24]

Our survey paper on recent advances of foundation models for biosignals is online.

[2025-06-10]

Our paper on SSL on wearables is accepted to Communications Engineering.

[2025-03-27]

Selected as Junior Research Fellow of Kellogg College (starting Michaelmas 2025).

[2025-01-02]

Our CFP for JBHI SI on biomedical sensing frontiers is live, welcome submissions!

[2024-12-02]

One paper on depth camera based pose estimation got accepted to IEEE TII.

[2024-11-04]

Selected as outstanding reviewer at BMVC24.

[2024-11-02]

Two papers on LLM and time series foundation models got accepted to ML4H24.

[2024-10-28]

One paper on semi-supervised medical image segmentation got accepted to WACV25.

[2024-10-28]

Gave a talk to HKUMed on GenAI in Medicine.

[2024-02-20]

One co-authored survey paper on lower-limb exoskeletons got accepted to IEEE SMC.

[2024-02-06]

One paper on Motor Imagery EEG got accepted to JBHI and selected as Front Cover.

[2024-01-15]

Our workshop focusing on wearables and healthcare robotics will be hosted at ICRA24.

[2023-09-12]

Started as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford.

[2023-08-23]

Passed my PhD viva! Many thanks to my supervisors, collaborators, and family! Thesis

[2023-08-22]

One co-authored paper on semi-supervsied image segmentation got accepted to BMVC23.

[2023-07-14]

One survey paper for AI in pervasive healthcare got accepted to IEEE R-BME.

[2023-05-30]

Co-organized workshop "AI in pervasive well-being and healthy ageing" at Glasgow.

[2023-05-15]

Awarded ICRA student travel grant.

[2023-01-27]

One paper on egocentric image captioning got accepted to IEEE T-Cyber.

[2023-01-24]

One paper on egocentric pose estimation got accepted to IEEE T-MM.

[2023-01-16]

Two papers on intention recognition and egocentric pose estimation got accepted to ICRA 2023.

[2022-09-30]

One paper on self-supervised learning on facial expression recognition got accepted to BMVC 2022.

[2022-09-10]

One co-authored paper on annotation uncertainty got accepted to Medical Image Analysis.

[2022-07-15]

Gave a talk on our ECCV paper at University of Glasgow Healthcare Seminar.

[2022-07-03]

One paper on long-tailed classification under domain shifts got accepted to ECCV 2022.

[2022-07-01]

Won 2nd prize at Imperial Computing PhD Poster Competition.

[2022-06-30]

Two papers on egocentric behaviour understanding got accepted to IROS 2022.

[2022-06-19]

Won 3rd place for EPIC-Kitchens Action Anticipation CVPR 2022 Challenge.

[2022-01-31]

One paper on gait pose estimation got accepted to ICRA 2022.

[More News]

My current research interest is centered around three complementary directions in AI for Medical Sensing
Fundamental Methods for Sensing Informatics
To develop representation learning and modeling methods tailored to the characteristics of "medical sensing informatics".
Data scarcity / source heterogeneity / data & annotation quality / ...
Foundation Sensing AI Modeling
To build, leverage, and rigorously evaluate foundation models with large-scale biosignal sensing datasets/cohorts.
Multimodal pretraining at scale / efficient adaptation / ...
Clinical Translation
To post-train and deploy biosignal foundation models in real clinical and community settings, methodologically for novelty, prospectively for evidence, practically for trust.
Hospital and home monitoring / low-resource settings / clinical decision support / ...

2026 Swiss AI Grant (400K GPU hours), in collaboration with ETH Zurich.

2026 Early Translational Fund (Co-I, $80K), translational study in Nepal.

2025 SDR UK Fellowship (PI, £200K), digital nurse triage with foundation AI and wearables.

2025 MLSTF-ETI Fund (PI, £50K), trustworthy transfer of biosignal foundation models.

Xiao Gu, Wei Tang, Jinpei Han, Veer Sangha, Fenglin Liu, Shreyank N Gowda, Antonio H Ribeiro, Patrick Schwab, Kim Branson, Lei Clifton, Antonio Luiz P Ribeiro, Zhangdaihong Liu, David A Clifton
Cardiac Health Assessment Across Scenarios and Devices Using a Multimodal Foundation Model Pretrained on Data from 1.7 Million Individuals
Nature Machine Intelligence (Front Cover), 2026. paper front cover code

Heterogeneity of sensing devices used for cardiac monitoring

Wei Tang, Jinpei Han, Kangning Cui, Mattia Carletti, Fredrik K Gustafsson, Shreyank N Gowda, Patitapaban Palo, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, Jean-Michel Morel, Raymond H Chan, David A Clifton, Xiao Gu^#
Extending Pretrained 10-Second ECG Foundation Models to Longer Horizons
Preprint, 2026. paper

Fredrik K Gustafsson^#, Xiao Gu^#, Mattia Carletti, Patitapaban Palo, David W Eyre, David A Clifton^#
SignalMC-MED: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Biosignal Foundation Models on Single-Lead ECG and PPG
Preprint, 2026. paper

Zhangdaihong Liu, Chang Liu, Fenglin Liu, Yixuan Chen, Yang Yang^#, David A Clifton, Xiao Gu^#
Biosignal Fingerprinting: A Cross-Modal PPG-ECG Foundation Model
Preprint, 2026. paper

Xiao Gu, Rebecca Nourse, Lei Lu, Emily Smout, Karen Fuller, Fiona Havord, Victoria Baran, Adam Briggs, Lei Clifton, Andrew Farmer, David A Clifton
Anticipating Health and Care Trajectories from Routinely Collected Social Care Records
npj Health Systems, 2026. paper

Xiao Gu, Zhangdaihong Liu, Jinpei Han, Jianing Qiu, Wenfei Fang, Lei Lu, Lei Clifton, Yuan-Ting Zhang, David A Clifton
Transforming Label-Efficient Decoding of Healthcare Wearables with Self-Supervised Learning and “Embedded” Medical Domain Expertise
Communications Engineering, 2025. paper code

Annotation difficulty of healthcare wearables waveforms

Xiao Gu^+#, Yuxuan Shu⁺, Jinpei Han⁺, Yuxuan Liu, Zhangdaihong Liu, James Anibal, Veer Sangha, Edward Phillips, Bradley Segal, Hang Yuan, Fenglin Liu, Kim Branson, Patrick Schwab, Danielle Belgrave, Lei Clifton, Dimitris Spathis, Vasileios Lampos, A Aldo Faisal, David A Clifton
Foundation Models for Biosignals: A Survey
Preprint, 2025. paper

Jinpei Han, Yinxuan Li, Xiao Gu, A Aldo Faisal
An EEG Conformer Model for Error Feedback During Human-Robot Interaction
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025. paper

Xiao Gu⁺, Yu Liu⁺, Zaineb Mohsin, Jonathan Bedford, Anshul Thakur, Peter Watkinson, Lei Clifton, Tingting Zhu, David A Clifton
Are Time Series Foundation Models Ready for Vital Sign Forecasting in Healthcare?
Machine Learning for Health (ML4H), 2024. paper

Jinpei Han, Xiao Gu^#, Guang-Zhong Yang, Benny Lo
Noise-Factorized Disentangled Representation Learning for Generalizable Motor Imagery EEG Classification
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2024 (Front Cover). paper front cover

Noise and artifact contamination in EEG recordings

Jianing Qiu, Frank P-W Lo, Xiao Gu, Modou L Jobarteh, Wenyan Jia, Tom Baranowski, Matilda Steiner-Asiedu, Alex K Anderson, Megan A McCrory, Edward Sazonov, Mingui Sun, Gary Frost, Benny Lo
Egocentric Image Captioning for Privacy-Preserved Passive Dietary Intake Monitoring
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 2023. paper

Yuxuan Liu, Jianxin Yang, Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Guang-Zhong Yang
EgoFish3D: Egocentric 3D Pose Estimation from a Fisheye Camera via Self-Supervised Learning
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2023. dataset paper

Intractable to get ground truth of egocentric pose

Yuxuan Liu, Jianxin Yang, Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Guang-Zhong Yang
EgoHMR: Egocentric Human Mesh Recovery via Hierarchical Latent Diffusion Model
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023. project paper

Xiao Gu, Jinpei Han, Guang-Zhong Yang, Benny Lo
Generalizable Movement Intention Recognition with Multiple Heterogeneous EEG Datasets
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023. paper

Cross-dataset configuration changes, cross-subject heterogeneity

Limited diversity (subject number) of single dataset

Yuxuan Shu, Xiao Gu, Guang-Zhong Yang, Benny Lo
Revisiting Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Facial Expression Recognition
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2022. project paper

Annotation difficulty of large-scale affective datasets

Cross-subject heterogeneity

Hanxiao Zhang, Liang Chen, Xiao Gu, Minghui Zhang, Yulei Qin, Feng Yao, Zhexin Wang, Yun Gu, Guang-Zhong Yang
Trustworthy Learning with (Un)sure Annotation for Lung Nodule Diagnosis with CT
Medical Image Analysis, 2022. paper

Annotation quality of the lung nodule diagnosis

Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Zeju Li, Jianing Qiu, Qi Dou, Yuxuan Liu, Benny Lo, Guang-Zhong Yang
Tackling Long-Tailed Category Distribution Under Domain Shifts
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022. project dataset paper

Imbalanced distribution

General cross-domain shifts

Xiao Gu, Jianxin Yang, Hanxiao Zhang, Jianing Qiu, Frank Lo, Yao Guo, Guang-Zhong Yang, Benny Lo
Occlusion-Invariant Rotation-Equivariant Semi-Supervised Depth Based Cross-View Gait Pose Estimation
Preprint 2021. dataset paper

Time-consuming and expensive to acquire ground truth from Mocap

Cross-viewpoint and sim2real heterogeneity

Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Guang-Zhong Yang, Benny Lo
Cross-Domain Self-Supervised Complete Geometric Representation Learning for Real-Scanned Point Cloud Based Pathological Gait Analysis
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2021. paper

Time-consuming and expensive to acquire ground truth from Mocap

Noise from depth sensing

Cross-viewpoint and sim2real heterogeneity

Yao Guo, Xiao Gu, Guang-Zhong Yang
MCDCD: Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Abnormal Human Gait Detection
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2021. paper

Cross-subject heterogeneity

Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Fani Deligianni, Benny Lo, Guang-Zhong Yang
Cross-Subject and Cross-Modal Transfer for Generalized Abnormal Gait Pattern Recognition
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2020. project paper

Cross-subject heterogeneity

Noisy sensory representations from wearable sensors

Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Fani Deligianni, Guang-Zhong Yang
Coupled Real-Synthetic Domain Adaptation for Real-World Deep Depth Enhancement
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2020. project paper

Difficult to acquire clean depth maps

Noisy depth maps from RGBD cameras

Yuxuan Liu, Jianxin Yang, Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Guang-Zhong Yang
Ego+X: An Egocentric Vision System for Global 3D Human Pose Estimation and Social Interaction Characterization
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022. project paper

Jianxin Yang, Yuxuan Liu, Xiao Gu, Gaung-Zhong Yang, Yao Guo
PoseSDF: Simultaneous 3D Human Shape Reconstruction and Gait Pose Estimation Using Signed Distance Functions
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022. paper

Jianing Qiu, Lipeng Chen, Xiao Gu, Frank P-W Lo, Ya-Yen Tsai, Jiankai Sun, Jiaqi Liu, Benny Lo
Egocentric Human Trajectory Forecasting with a Wearable Camera and Multi-Modal Fusion
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2022. dataset paper

Jianing Qiu, Frank Lo, Xiao Gu, Yingnan Sun, Shuo Jiang, Benny Lo
Indoor Future Person Localization from an Egocentric Wearable Camera
2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021. paper

Jinpei Han, Xiao Gu, Benny Lo
Semi-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Generalizable Motor Imagery EEG Classification
2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN), 2021. paper

Annotation uncertainty

Cross-subject/session heterogeneity

Fangzhi Mu, Xiao Gu, Yao Guo, Benny Lo
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Position-Independent IMU based Gait Analysis
2020 IEEE Sensors, 2020. paper

Cross-position/subject heterogeneity

Yao Guo, Fani Deligianni, Xiao Gu, Guang-Zhong Yang
3D Canonical Pose Estimation and Abnormal Gait Recognition with a Single RGB-D Camera
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2019. paper

Xiao Gu, Fani Deligianni, Benny Lo, Wei Chen, Guang-Zhong Yang
Markerless Gait Analysis based on a Single RGB Camera
2018 IEEE 15th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN), 2018. paper slides

Saeed Akbarzadeh, Xiao Gu, Zhipeng Wu, Benny Lo
A Novel Active Human Echolocation Device
2022 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN), 2022. paper

Hongyu Chen, Xiao Gu, Zhenning Mei, Ke Xu, Kai Yan, Chunmei Lu, Laishuan Wang, Feng Shu, Qixin Xu, Sidarto Bambang Oetomo, Wei Chen
A Wearable Sensor System for Neonatal Seizure Monitoring
2017 IEEE 14th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN), 2017. paper

2026 Sept, Organizer, ECCV 3rd Workshop on Privacy, Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Computer Vision.
2026 July, Organizer, Oxford-OUCRU Workshop on Clinical Wearables.
2025 Nov, Technical Committee, BMVC 2nd Workshop on Privacy, Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Computer Vision.
2024 Nov, Technical Committee, BMVC 1st Workshop on Privacy, Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Computer Vision, Nov 2024.
2024 May, Lead Organizer, 1st ICRA Workshop on Wearable Intelligence for Healthcare Robotics.
2023 June, Organizer, Workshop on AI in Pervasive Well-Being and Healthy Ageing.

Journal Editorial: Lead Guest Editor, JBHI Special Issue on Efficient DL Frontiers for Next-Gen. Biomedical Sensing Intelligence.
Journal Reviewer: IEEE TPAMI, Medical Image Analysis, IEEE TNNLS, IEEE TII, IEEE TMI, IEEE JBHI, IEEE TBME, IEEE TNSRE, IEEE RA-L, IEEE Sensors Journal, IEEE JTEHM, IEEE Mobile Computing, etc.
Senior PC / Area Chair: IJCAI 26.
Conference PC/Reviewer: WACV 20, ICRA 21-, IROS 21-, EPIC-ICCVW 21, ML4H 21-, IPCAI 22, SSCI 22, NeurIPS-TS4H 22, ECCV 22-, EMBC 23, BHI 23-, CVPR 23-, ICCV 23, BMVC 23- (Outstanding Reviewer), ACCV 24, NeurIPS 24-, ICLR 24-, ICML 26- (Gold Reviewer).
Grant: Africa Oxford Initiative - Health Innovation Fellowship Programme, UKRI Innovation.

2026 Aug, "Foundation AI for Medical Sensing".
ABCP Annual Conference 2026, UK.
2026 Aug, "Foundation AI for Medical Sensing".
Oura Science Team, London, UK.
2026 July, "AI and Wearables for Healthcare".
Carisurg MedTech, Caribbean.
2026 June, "Engineering Healthcare with Sensing Intelligence".
IET Berkshire Lecture, UK.
2026 June, "The AI that Decodes “Languages” of Human Physiology".
Kellogg College JRF Research Showcase, UK.
2026 Mar, "Wearables and Foundation Models".
Oxford BRC Wearables Workshop, UK.
2025 Mar, "Foundation Models for Biomedical Time Series Analysis".
Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU), Vietnam.
2024 Oct, "(Gen)AI for Healthcare and Medicine: An Engineer's Perspective".
LKS Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, HK.
2023 Sept, "Towards Data-Efficient and Generalizable Learning for Sensing Informatics".
CIME Seminar, Fudan University, China.
2023 Jan, "Towards Data-Efficient and Generalizable Learning for Sensing Informatics".
Oxford Wearables Group, University of Oxford, UK.
2022 Dec, "Towards Generalization in Rehabilitative and Assistive Healthcare: From Gait, Eye, to Brain".
Brain and Behaviour Lab, Imperial College London, UK.
2022 July, "Tackling Long-Tailed Distribution Under Domain Shifts for Egocentric Action Anticipation".
Healthcare Seminar, University of Glasgow, UK.
2021 Jan, "Generalizable Deep Learning in Pervasive Healthcare: Case Study in Gait Analysis".
CIME Seminar, Fudan University, China.
2020 May, "Learning from Synthetic Data for Real-World Tasks".
ML in Science Colloquium, University of Glasgow, UK.

2026 Early-Career Award, Life Sciences and Health Track, ABCP Annual Conference.
2026 STEM for Britain Finalist. [Photo]
2023 IEEE ICRA Student Travel Grant.
2020 Dean's Prize in Medical Robotics and Image Guided Intervention (highest honour), Imperial College London.
2018 Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai.
2018 Honours Student Award in Electronic Engineering, Fudan University.
2018 Xiyuan Scholar (Excellence), Fudan Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (FDUROP No. 16486).
2017 Outstanding Student, Fudan University.
2016 Outstanding Student Leader, Fudan University.
2015 Outstanding Student, Fudan University.

2026 Junior Research Fellowship, Mansfield College, Oxford.
2026 Smart Data Research UK Fellowship, ESRC, UKRI.
2025 Junior Research Fellowship, Kellogg College, Oxford.
2019-2023 Fully funded PhD Scholarship, Imperial College London (£20K per annum).
2018 Master Scholarship, Imperial College London (£15K per annum).
2017 National Scholarship (RMB ¥8k).
2017 1st Prize, Joel & Ruth Spira Scholarship (RMB ¥10k), Fudan University.
2016 1st Prize, ELITE Liu Yong Ling Scholarship (RMB ¥5k), Fudan University.
2015 2nd Prize, Scholarship for Outstanding Students, Fudan University.

2025 Outstanding Award, 1st Yangtze River Delta High-Value Patent Commercialisation Competition.
2022 2nd Place, Imperial ICC PhD Conference Poster Competition.
2022 3rd Place, EPIC-Kitchens Egocentric Action Anticipation CVPR Challenge 2022. [Report]
2021 3rd Place, EPIC-Kitchens Egocentric Action Anticipation CVPR Challenge 2021. [Report]
2018 Silver Prize, Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions, Geneva, Switzerland. [News]
2017 1st Prize, National University Biomedical Engineering Challenge (team leader), China. [Video][Photo]

CONTACT

Email
xiao.gu@eng.ox.ac.uk
~~xiao.gu17@imperial.ac.uk~~
shawngu0822@gmail.com

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