Dr. Zilu Liang

Zilu Liang received her MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Information Systems from the University of Tokyo in 2011 and 2015, respectively. She pursued exchange studies at the University of Oxford in 2010 and at the Imperial College London (with Prof John Polak) in 2012. In 2015 she was selected as a recipient of the Australian Government Endeavor Research Fellowship which sponsored her postdoctoral research at the University of Melbourne (with Prof James Bailey, Prof Lars Kulik and Dr Bernd Ploderer). During 2016-2019 she was an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo. She is a member of a number of research associations and she has received several awards for her research achievements.

Zilu is an avant-garde supporter of the Quantified Self movement . She combines a wide variety of sensing, computing, and data mining techniques to tackle the challenges surrounding data collection, data analysis, and human-computer interaction in Quantified Self, with a strong focus on health and wellbeing. Her research projects have been sponsored by a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Startup (2016-2018), an AIST Grant for Early-Career Researcher (2016-2018), an AMED Interstellar Initiative Grant (2018-2019), and a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists (2019-2021). She has close collaborations with the Queensland University of Technology in Australia and the Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and is looking forward to involving highly-motivated students in several exciting on-going research projects (more details on personal website).

Growing up in a family of teachers, Zilu has a natural passion for teaching. She received faculty development training on teaching and mentorship in the University of Melbourne. Her teaching style builds on validated educational theories. She seeks to further explore the mechanisms that underlie interpersonal differences in effective learning and teaching based on brain science and data mining. Since 2018, she has been serving as a program committee member and a reviewer for top notch international conferences on engineering and computing education, including the ACM Global Computing Education Conference (CompEd), the ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education (SIGCSE) and the IEEE Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE). She is a member of the Japanese Society for Engineering Education.

Zilu treasures physical strength and is addicted to exercise. When she is not doing research or teaching, you can find her doing Taekwondo, hot yoga, or weight training.