Meet SCI's New Faculty: Xiaowei Jia

Name: Xiaowei Jia 
Title: Assistant Professor
Department: Computer Science

Bio:
Xiaowei Jia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Vipin Kumar. Prior to that, he got his M.S. degree from State University of New York at Buffalo in 2015 and his B.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 2012. His research interests include physics-guided data science, spatio-temporal data mining, deep learning, and remote sensing. His work has been published in major data mining and AI journals (e.g., TKDE) and conferences (e.g., SIGKDD, ICDM, SDM, and CIKM), as well as top-tier journals in hydrology (e.g., WRR) and agronomy (e.g., Agricultural Economics). Xiaowei was the recipient of the UMN Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2019), the Best Conference Paper Award in ASONAM 16, and the Best Student Paper Award in BIBE 14.

What are your research interests?
My research interests include physics-guided data science, spatio-temporal data mining, deep learning and remote sensing.   

Why did you choose to come to SCI?
I chose SCI because of its great research atmosphere. Faculty members in SCI are making a lot of progress in their own research domain and also I can see a clear potential for collaboration with other faculty members.

How does your research/teaching align with SCI’s mission?
One major aspect of my research is to develop a new generation of data-driven methods for modeling physical systems by capturing underlying processes that are evolving and interacting at different spatial and temporal scales, thus providing better predictive accuracy, generalizability and scientific interpretability.  This can directly contribute to SCI's mission of modeling complex and interacting natural and engineered systems.