My background is in Computer Science and my research aims at making information systems, especially learning systems, more personalized, intelligent and adaptive, as well as enabling those systems to make use of the huge amounts of collected data to provide decision makers (e.g., students, teachers, etc.) with actionable information. My research expertise and interests include adaptivity and personalization, user modelling, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, academic analytics, educational technology and game-based learning. More concretely, my research focuses on three directions: (1) automatically and dynamically identifying various aspects of user characteristics, strategies and needs from user interaction data and sensor data; (2) designing intelligent algorithms and mechanisms to use such comprehensive user data to provide users with adaptive and intelligent support and recommendations; and (3) advancing techniques for data analytics and learning analytics to analyse users’ behaviour data in a system and identify useful and actionable information.

I am a Professor at Athabasca University (AU), School of Computing and Information Systems, in Canada. Before joining AU in 2009, I worked as postdoctoral researcher at National Central University in Taiwan, and as graduate researcher and lecturer at Vienna University of Technology in Austria. I have published more than 130 peer-reviewed journal papers, book chapters, and conference papers which have been cited over 8,200 times and four conference papers were awarded with a best paper award. I have received over $2.3M research funding from sources such as NSERC, CFI and others to conduct high quality research. I have been invited to present my research findings in keynote/invited talks at universities, companies and conferences around the world. I am also very active in the organization of international conferences/workshops, editorial activities for international journals, and reviewing of funding applications for major funding bodies.