Xiujun Li

Research Engineer
Aviz Group, INRIA,
Microsoft Research - INRIA Joint Center,
Reactivity Project (INRIA & MSR-Redmond)

Contact:
AVIZ Group, LRI,
Building 490, University of Paris-Sud,
Orsay Cedex, 91405, France
Email: nklixiujun[at]gmail[dot]com (the best way to reach me)
         Xiujun.Li[at]inria[dot]fr

Research Interest   Research   Experience   Publications   Curriculum Vitae   Visualization Samples

My research spans Graphics, HCI, and Data Management/Mining. I am particularly interested in two things: Data and Graphical Representation. My research goal is to make sense of the data, employ some graphical/artistical means to provide the better communication, convey the information more effective to the viewers, help people to amplify their vision system to allow the users to observe the data, gain the insight from the flood of data, to make up the gap between Data Mining and Human Understanding, to provide a better communication medium for the two powerful information processing systems – Humans and Computers to reach the goal of helping Human Understanding Data. I conduct my research according to this line:

Data -> Information: In this information-rich society, data is generated at a unprecedented speed, though these data is massive in size, they should be replete with rich structures, and hidden patterns or relationships behind them, so a challenge is posed to us: "How can we represent and interpret such complex, abstract and inconsistent data", this is important and useful for our society. So Statistics, Data Mining or Statistical Machine Learning are helpful for translating these complex data into information which is useful for us.

Information -> Perpesentation: In the above section, the raw data is transferred to the useful information, but has little help to people's understanding. In this section, there are several sub-topics to maximize the information for human understanding.

• Visual Data Mining: Data Mining usually extracts "hidden" information behind the raw data warehouse, Visualization can do aid people to observe, understand the abstract data. In the visualization process, there is one key component - Representation. The graphical representation should be simple enough to be easily understood, but complete enough to reveal all the information present in the model. So this is a difficult balance sincce Simplicity usually trades off against Completeness. So seeking a representation that is Complete, Understandable, and Simple, which is vital in my research.
• Information Visualization & Visual Analytics: Research around Information - Graphical Metaphors - Perception, effectively convey the abstract data to users, amplify the human vision of a sort,
• Illustrative Visualization: Research on how to employ some techniques in Art/Illustration into Visualization to convey the information more effective to viewers.
• Seek for the unified technology for InfoVis, Scientific Visualization, Illustrative Visualization etc.

The above topics can be thought of as "Understanding by Seeing". In the Visualization process, another important part is Interaction, which can be thought of as "Understanding by Doing". I propose that we can do some experiencement in our human nature, in many cases we exploit the brain's ability to reason about cause and effect, try to employ some of human's built-in properties which are easy for human to understand, while not try to introduce more rules in our system.

• Next Generation HCI: Reality-Based Interaction to reduce the mental effort required to operate the system, and utilize the users' built-in abilities (such as Human Cognitive Perception, Context-Awareness etc.).

Also, another part of research interests are Multimedia Networking. Multimedia contents are becoming increasingly popular over the Internet, and being accessed by a variety of network devices either wired or wireless. What I want to do is:

• Seamless connections between Networks and Multimedia Devices;
• Multimedia with QOS guarantees;
• Traffic control and transmission management.

More details, please see my Research page.

Thinking Life?

I was born on 29th Feburary, 1988, so I have a birthday every four years. Everyone will think "Oh, you are so lucky!", but in fact, luck always plays trick on me, so I have to fight again it to get more opportunities. Do not feel sad about that, I think it is good for one to grow up in such an environment. Also, you need to know, "Improving your odds doesn't guarantee success", said by Bill Gates on 2007 Harvard Graduation Ceremony. As a young, you should have your own thougths which is pivotal to your life, it determines the style and level you handling with problems. Do not worry about your limitation of knowledge, Erudition is a kind of stage for you, but Wisdom (turning the knowledge into wisdom) is another kind of high-level state.

Thinking Research?

I am 22 years old this year. Here, I want to say "How time flies". How long time I can work on Research?
Definitely, I am deeply attracted by Research, the exciting research topics. I began my research career at my 18 age, at that time, I was still a sophormore undergraduate. At my 20, I worked at EECS, Peking University, what I have seen is a quite different research view. Then, I moved to MSRA at my last undergraduate year, I found it is easy for me to communicate with the Master or Ph.D students there, yes, MSRA is a great experience in my life. At my 21 years old, I graduated from Nankai University, I began to work as a Research Staff at Nanyang Technological University, also this is another experience of research, people there are targeted with conference papers, I can not accept this kind of life, so I moved to INRIA, started my research there.

Research - I think there are many exciting research works at this information-rich society, I do not want to waste my life on paper-driving, the research I'd like is the practical research which will has bring benefit to people's life. Yes, paper is inevitable in research, but I pay more attention on how my work will influence the people. Time is limited for one, I just want to do some meaningful thing during my lifetime. So I am very desire for a good research environment.

I created a seperated page for describing my view to Research, pls click here.