Dr Xingjie Wei

Associate Professor in Business Analytics & Machine Learning

Research Interests: Social computing, business analytics, social data mining

Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds

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Email: x.wei1 at leeds dot ac dot uk
Twitter: @xingjiewei

About

I am an Associate Professor in the Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds. I received my Ph.D degree in Computer Science from the University of Warwick and worked as a Research Associate in the Psychometrics Centre, Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Leeds, I was a lecturer at the University of Bath. I was also a Visiting Researcher in the National Lab of Pattern Recognition (NLPR) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

My research interests lie in the interaction between data science, and business and management to understand human behaviour through psychological experiments, big data analytics, and machine learning modelling. My research develops quantitative models to describe and predict behavioural and psychological traits (e.g., personality) of humans from unstructured data (e.g., text, image), which can be applied to improve management practice in many fields such as marketing and finance. I am particularly interested in applying cross-disciplinary techniques to discover hidden patterns within data and generate insights to guide governments, public sector organisations, and businesses to transform the way they work to make their services more cost-effective and easier to use. I am particularly interested in:

understanding and identifying human traits : faces, expressions, personalities, intelligence, confidence...
unstructured multimodal data mining: texts, images, EEGs...
employing those computational techniques to improve business and management practices

Prospective students, post-docs and visiting researchers

I am accepting PhD students and am interested in supervising topics related to the above areas using big data and machine learning techniques. Students are also welcome to propose their own topics. I also welcome visiting PhD students. Please send me an email with your CV and research statement for further discussion. Scholarship opportunities: University, White Rose

PhD student: 2021-present Mr Junhao Liang, 'Machine learning in credit risk management'
PhD student: 2022-present Miss Siran Wang, 'Social media language and problem gambling behaviour'
PhD student: 2023-present Miss Yao Wang, 'Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making'

Visiting and Post-doc researchers are welcome to apply for competitive fellowships. For example RS visiting fellowship

News

Our paper The impact of CEO political ideology on labor cost reductions and payout decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic has been accepted by the Journal of Corporate Finance. Accepted version [PDF]
Our paper Actors' Facial Similarity and its Impact on U.S. Movies' Box-Office Performance in East and South-East Asia has been accepted by the International Marketing Review.
Xingjie Wei is involved in a new KTP project funded by the Innovate UK to develop, deploy and embed a bespoke business dashboard driven by complex AI and machine learning algorithms to enable tailored and customer-centric financial service provisions to the legal sector.
Xingjie Wei has secured the Collaborative Award from the ESRC White Rose DTP on the project "Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making" to recruit a 4-year fully funded PhD student (international rates).
Xingjie Wei has secured an ESRC grant to build a research network between the UK and South Korea for the project "Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data."
Our research project "Predicting inequality from digital textual data" has been funded by the LUBS Challenge Fund.
Our paper Confidence and Capital Raising has been accepted by the Journal of Corporate Finance. Accepted version [PDF]

Publication

Journal

2024, A. Bayat, M. Goergen, P. Koutroumpis, X. Wei, "The impact of CEO political ideology on labor cost reductions and payout decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic", Journal of Corporate Finance (ABS4) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
2024, V. Giannetti, J. Chen and X. Wei, "Actors' Facial Similarity and its Impact on U.S. Movies' Box-Office Performance in East and South-East Asia", International Marketing Review (ABS3) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
2022, W. Huang, S. Vismara and X. Wei, "Confidence and Capital Raising", Journal of Corporate Finance (ABS4) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
2020, Y. Liu, M. Hultman, A. B. Eisingerich, X. Wei. "How Does Brand Loyalty Interact with Tourism Destination? Exploring the Effect of Brand Loyalty on Place Attachment", Annals of Tourism Research (ABS4). [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
2018, A. Doukani, X. Wei, B. Kader, F. Soazandry, & B. Inkser (2018). "Views From the Street Pilot Study: Constraints and Difficulties of Using Photographs in Research of a Complex Nature Such as Homelessness", Biomedical Informatics Insights. [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
2017, G. Zhao, Y. Ge, B. Shen, X. Wei, and H. Wang, "Emotion Analysis for Personality Inference from EEG Signals", IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (Impact factor: 13.99), Dec. 2017 [Bibtex] [PDF]
2014, X. Wei, C.-T. Li, Z. Lei, D. Yi, Stan Z. Li, "Dynamic Image-to-Class Warping for Occluded Face Recognition", IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) (Impact factor: 7.231), vol. 9, no. 12, Dec. 2014 [Bibtex] [PDF] [Code]
2014, Y. Guan, X. Wei, and C.-T. Li, "On the Generalization Power of Face and Gait in Gender Recognition", International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics (IJDCF), vol. 6, no. 1, Jan. 2014 [Bibtex] [PDF] (Winner of the 2014 IGI Global's Excellence in Research Journal Award)

Peer-reviewed Conference (Proceeding)

2018, H. Wang, X. Wei, V. Sanchez and C.-T. Li, "Fusion Network for Face-Based Age Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Oct., 2018, Greece [Bibtex] [PDF]
2017, X. Wei and D. Stillwell, “How smart does your profile image look? Estimating intelligence from social network profile images”, ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Feb., 2017, UK [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides] [Poster]
2016, X. Wei*, J. Palomaki*, J. Yan and P. Robinson, "The Science and Detection of Tilting", ACM International Conference in Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), Jun., 2016, US (*denotes equal contribution) [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]
2015, B.-B. Liu, X. Wei and J. Yan, "Enhancing sensor pattern noise for source camera identification: an empirical evaluation", ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSEC), Jun., 2015, US [Bibtex] [PDF]
2014, Y. Guan, X. Wei, C.-T. Li, and Y. Keller, "People Identification and Tracking through Fusion of Facial and Gait Features", Invited Paper, International Workshop on Biometrics (BIOMET), Jun., 2014, Bulgaria [Bibtex] [PDF]
2014, X. Lin, X. Wei and C.-T. Li, "Two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images", IS&T/SPIE Conference on Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics, Feb., 2014, US [Bibtex] [PDF]
2013, Y. Guan, X. Wei, C.-T. Li, G. L. Marcialis, F. Roli and M. Tistarelli, "Combining Gait and Face for Tackling the Elapsed Time Challenges" IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS), Sep. 2013, US [Bibtex] [PDF]
2013, X. Wei and C.-T. Li, "Fixation and Saccade based Face Recognition from Single Image per Person with Various Occlusions and Expressions", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop on Biometrics (CVPRW), Jun. 2013, US [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]
2013, X. Wei, C.-T. Li and Y. Hu, "Face Recognition with Occlusion Using Dynamic Image-to-Class Warping (DICW)", IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), Apr. 2013, China [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides] [Poster] [Code]
2013, X. Wei, C.-T. Li and Y. Hu, "Robust Face Recognition with Occlusions in both Reference and Query Images", International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF), Apr. 2013, Portugal [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]
2012, X. Wei, C.-T. Li and Y. Hu, “Robust Face Recognition under Varying Illumination and Occlusion considering Structured Sparsity”, International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), Dec. 2012, Australia [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]

Book Chapter

2016, X. Wei and C.-T. Li, “Face Recognition Technologies for Evidential Evaluation of Video Traces”, Handbook of Biometrics for Forensic Science, ed. by M. Tistarelli and C. Champod, Springer (in press) [Bibtex] [PDF]
2015, B. Arbab-Zavar, X. Wei, J.D. Bustard, M.S. Nixon and C.-T. Li, "On Forensic Use of Biometrics", Handbook of Digital Forensics of Multimedia Data and Devices, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.[Bibtex] [PDF]

Grant

11/2023-11/2025, Academic support, Knowledge transfer partnerships(KTP) with Katchr to develop, deploy and embed a bespoke business dashboard driven by complex AI and machine learning algorithms to enable tailored and customer-centric financial service provisions to the legal sector, £324,129, Innovate UK.
09/2023-09/2027, Primary supervisor, Collaborative Award, White Rose DTP, "Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making" to recruit a 4-year fully funded PhD student (international rates, equivalent to £150,166), ESRC
02/2022-06/2023, PI, "LINK: Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data - a multidisciplinary network between UK and South Korea", £45,758, ESRC
01/2022-08/2023, PI, "Predicting inequality from digital textual data", £21,467, LUBS Challenge Fund
02/2019-11/2020, PI, "Visual analytics on CEO profile images in initial coin offerings (ICO)", £2,000, University of Leeds
02/2017-11/2017, PI, "Image pre-processing for automatic face recognition in forensics applications", £37,500, Metropolitan Police Service

Teaching

I am the Head of Year for Bsc Business Analytics Programme (2018-2021), and the Academic Tutor for the MSc Business Analytics and Decision Sciences programme (since 2020). I am also passionate about contributing to STEM education for young people by hosting Nuffield Research Placement projects.

Since 2018, University of Leeds

2017-2018, University of Bath

Media

Selected media coverage around our paper How smart does your profile image look? Estimating intelligence from social network profile images:

Attention score:

Professional Activity

Editorial service

2023, Editorial Board Member, Discover Analytics
2022, Special Issue Editor, "Connecting Data, People, and Artificial Intelligence toward Smart and Personalized Healthcare", A special issue of Sensors
2015-2018, Associate Editor, International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics (IJDCF)

External PhD examiner

2023, Dr. Trung Thanh Dang, 'Enhancing intraday stock prediction and trading with social media sentiment using deep learning', University of Hull
2021, Dr. Samadhi Poornima Kumarasinghe Wickrama Arachchilage, 'Adaptive Domain Learning for Improved Face Recognition', Queen Mary University of London

External mentor

2021-present, Research mentor for PostDoc, University of Cambridge, UK

Invited Talk

2023, Invited talk, "Analysing Automobile Recalls using Text Mining", Big Data seminar, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France
2022, Panel discussion, "Promoting the culture of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI): impacts of research to society." Designing human resource management (HRM) practices to support NHS staff of minority ethnic backgrounds project workshop, UK
2022, Invited talk, "Unstructured data mining in finance applications.", ABCP Annual Conference, UK
2021, Invited talk, "How digital images affect audience perceptions", Leeds Digital Festival, UK
2021, Invited talk, "Psychological Profile Analysis via Digital Footprints", Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
2020, Invited talk, "Can we judge a book by its cover? confidence and capital raising in ICO", University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China
2019, Invited talk and panel discussion, "Text and image analytics in supply chain", Ideas in Practice Supply Chain Summit 2019, UK
2018, Collaborative research discussion, "Data scraping for real-time economic indicators", The Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, UK
2017, Short course of two lectures, "Computational visual analysis techniques", University of Science and Technology Beijing, China
2017, Invited speaker on "Do you fit in your business school? University personality study from social media", The Jingshi Conference on Educational Data Mining and Applications, China
2017, Panel discussion on "Technology & methodologies in digital mental health", Innovation & Strategies for Digital Interventions in Mental Health, UK

Conference and Workshop Organisation

2023, Workshop Chair, 13th EAI International Conference on Big Data Technologies and Applications, UK
2022, Session Chair, Entrepreneurial Finance (ENTFIN) Association Annual Meeting 2022, UK
2017, Track Chair (Identification through Data Mining), The 16th Australian Data Mining Conference(AusDM), Australia
2017, Session Chair, Workshop on Hybrid Human-Machine Computing (HHMC), UK
2017, Workshop leader, "View from the street: visual literacy and digital photographic analysis for helping homeless people", Innovation & Strategies for Digital Interventions in Mental Health, UK

Program Committees Member

2024, IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA), China
2017, Workshop on Hybrid Human-Machine Computing (HHMC), UK
2017, International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF), UK
2016, International Conference on Advances in Signal, Image and Video Processing (SIGNAL), Portugal
2015, International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing (IIH-MSP), Australia
2014, International Conference in Information Security and Digital Forensics (ISDF), Greece
2014, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), China