Zhidan Liu (刘志丹) is currently an Assistant Professor at Intelligent Transportation Thrust, System Hub, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and a Cross-Campus Faculty Affiliate at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining HKUST (GZ), he was a faculty member with College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University (2017-2024), and a postdoctoral research fellow at School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (2015-2017), working closely with Prof. Mo Li. He received the B.E. degree and Ph.D. degree, both in computer science and technology, from Northeastern University in June 2009 and Zhejiang University in September 2014, respectively. He is now heading the MobiX research group at HKUST (GZ). He is a senior member of IEEE and CCF, a member of ACM.

Please find my CV here.

Research Interests:

• Artificial Internet of Things (AIoT) / 智能物联网
• Urban Computing, Smart Mobility / 城市计算, 智慧出行
• Mobile and Edge Computing & Intelligence / 移动和边缘计算&智能
• Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing / 群智感知与众包
• Spatio-Temporal Data Mining and Analytics / 时空数据挖掘与分析
• Federated Learning / 联邦学习

Hiring: I'm actively seeking self-motivated Ph.D. students (recent opennings for 2027 Spring/Fall), Research Assistants, and Postdoc. If interested, please feel free to send an email with your information (e.g., resume, transcripts, research proposal, and publications if any). Perspective students are highly encouraged to apply to my Research Assistant positions first. You can have a close look at my research group, and we can also try to find common research interests before you start your research career.

We are welcoming RBM/Undergraduate students as well, please email me for appointmenting an offline meeting. For prospective RBM students, if you are interested in my group, please directly apply in the system, we may schedule an offline meeting during your onsite interview.

Please read this file for more details (in Chinese). 招聘详情请参考此文件以及公众号文章.

Recent Highlights:

• 2026.03 - Our paper “ArmPad: Transforming Forearms into Interaction Interfaces with Smartwatches” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Congrats to Zhenyu. 🎉
• 2026.03 - Our paper “Heterogeneous Multi-Modal Multi-Label Behavioral Context Recognition Using Wearable Sensors and Mobile Devices” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. Congratulations 🎉
• 2025.11 - Our paper “Accelerating Graph Similarity Search with Maximum Common Subgraphs” has been accepted by GPC 2025. Congrats to Yaqi and Zhengze. 🎉
• 2025.08 - Honored​ to receive a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). We sincerely appreciate ​NSFC’s ongoing support for​ our research! 🥳
• 2025.08 - Great honor to receive the Best Reviewer Award from CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction! 🥳
• 2025.08 - Invited to serve on the TPC of Australasian Database Conference (ADC) 2025. Please consider submitting.
• 2025.08 - Our paper “DSETA: Driving Style-Aware Estimated Time of Arrival” has been accepted by ACM CIKM 2025. Congrats to Bolin. 🎉
• 2025.08 - Invited to serve on the TPC of IEEE MSN 2025. Please consider submitting.
• 2025.07 - Our paper “Spatio-Temporal Diffusion Model for Cellular Traffic Generation” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Congrats to Xiaosi and Xiaowen. 🎉
• 2025.07 - Our paper “Regional Knowledge Transfer for Urban Traffic Flow Prediction via Satellite Imagery Assisted Contrastive Domain Adaptation” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Congrats to Zhengze and Bolin. 🎉
• 2025.07 - Our paper “Enabling Effective OOD Detection via Plug-and-Play Network for Mobile Visual Applications” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Congrats to Zixiao. 🎉
• 2025.05 - Our paper “DI2SDiff++: Activity Style Decomposition and Diffusion-Based Fusion for Cross-Person Generalization in Activity Recognition” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Congrats to Junru. 🎉

Selected Publications:

• Zhidan Liu, Yingqian Zhou, Xiaosi Liu, Haodi Zhang, Yabo Dong, Dongming Lu, Kaishun Wu. Learning Road Network Index Structure for Efficient Map Matching, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 37, Issue 1, Pages 423-437, January 2025. (codes)

  • Enhancing HMM-Based map matching through learned Indexing and adaptive search range for precise candidate refinement

• Zhidan Liu, Jiancong Liu, Xiaowen Xu, Kaishun Wu. DeepGPS: Deep Learning Enhanced GPS Positioning in Urban Canyons, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol. 23, Issue 1, Pages 376-392, January 2024. (codes)

  • Exploiting deep learning to decode the relationship between positioning contexts and GPS estimations in urban canyons

• Zhidan Liu, Jiangzhou Li, Kaishun Wu. Context-Aware Taxi Dispatching at City-Scale Using Deep Reinforcement Learning, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vol. 23, Issue 3, Pages 1996-2009, March 2022. (codes)

  • An ESI highly cited paper, which innovates the application of deep reinforcement learning in large-scale vehicle dispatching

• Zhidan Liu, Zengyang Gong, Jiangzhou Li, Kaishun Wu. Mobility-Aware Dynamic Taxi Ridesharing, in IEEE ICDE, Dallas, Texas, USA, April 2020.

  • Exploiting mobility information to efficiently serve both online and offline riders in dynamic ridesharing

• Zhidan Liu, Pengfei Zhou, Zhenjiang Li, Mo Li. Think Like A Graph: Real-Time Traffic Estimation at City-Scale, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol. 18, Issue 10, Pages 2446-2459, October 2019.

  • Leveraging graph-parallel computing for precise, timely, and scalable traffic estimations through Apache Spark implementation