News

• Junhao Liang was awarded the Tom Lupton Prize for the Tabular Image paper.
• Xingjie wei has secured a Research Culture Targeted Funding from the Research England.
• Junhao Liang passed his viva with minor corrections! congratulations Junhao!
• Our paper "Tabular Image: a method to convert tabular data to images for convolutional neural networks" has been accepted by the Annals of Operations Research. This is based on the first chapter of our PGR Junhao Liang's PhD thesis, congratulations Junhao! Accepted version [PDF]
• Xingjie Wei is involved in a new KTP project funded by the Innovate UK with the SR Mailing Ltd.
• Our paper The impact of CEO political ideology on labor cost reductions and payout decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic has been accepted by the Journal of Corporate Finance. Accepted version [PDF]
• Our paper Actors' Facial Similarity and its Impact on U.S. Movies' Box-Office Performance in East and South-East Asia has been accepted by the International Marketing Review.
• Xingjie Wei is involved in a new KTP project funded by the Innovate UK with Katchr
• Xingjie Wei has secured the Collaborative Award from the ESRC White Rose DTP on the project "Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making".
• Xingjie Wei has secured an ESRC grant to build a research network between the UK and South Korea for the project "Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data."
• Our research project "Predicting inequality from digital textual data" has been funded by the LUBS Challenge Fund.
• Our paper Confidence and Capital Raising has been accepted by the Journal of Corporate Finance. Accepted version [PDF]
• Our paper "How Does Brand Loyalty Interact with Tourism Destination? Exploring the Effect of Brand Loyalty on Place Attachment" has been accepted by the Annals of Tourism Research.
• Our paper "Emotion Analysis for Personality Inference from EEG Signals" has been accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
• Our paper "How smart does your profile image look? Estimating intelligence from social network profile images" has been accepted by the ACM WSDM 2017
• Our book chapter "Face Recognition Technologies for Evidential Evaluation of Video Traces" in the "Handbook of Biometrics for Forensic Science" is in press now.
• Our paper "The science and detection of tilting" has been accepted by the ACM ICMR 2016.
• Our paper "On the Generalization Power of Face and Gait in Gender Recognition" published in the International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics has won the IGI Global's Excellence in Research Journal Award for 2014.

About

I am an Associate Professor in the Centre for Decision Research at Leeds. I obtained my Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Warwick and taught at Cambridge and Bath before. My research group operates at the intersection of business analytics and human behaviour. We build predictive machine learning and decision-support models to solve complex operational problems across finance, marketing, and management. While conventional analytics relies heavily on structured, transactional data, our core focus is extracting actionable signals from the unstructured data (e.g., images, text and digital footprints) that drives real-world choices. Many of these signals are psychological rather than operational: personality, emotion, confidence, perceived competence and other human traits inferred from faces, language and online behaviour. This approach is particularly powerful in environments where traditional data is sparse, delayed, or uninformative. We work closely with colleagues across finance, marketing, operations and psychology, and with external partners including government departments, research councils, policing, and enterprises.

Current research interests:

• Predictive analytics for credit risk, fraud detection and financial decision-making
• Machine learning for unstructured and multimodal data in decision support
• Analytics for policy and social outcomes: wellbeing, inequality, and responsible business practice

Prospective PhD students and collaborators

We welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students with backgrounds in operational research, analytics, computer science, statistics, psychology or a quantitative business discipline. Projects typically combine a substantive decision problem with methodological work in machine learning, and there is scope to weight the balance towards either. PhD Scholarship opportunities: University, White Rose. Visiting and Post-doc researchers are welcome to apply for competitive fellowships. For example RS visiting fellowship , MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships.

Please contact me via email to discuss potential research opportunities. In your initial email, please include:

• A clear research proposal outlining your proposed study, research questions, and methodology
• A comprehensive CV highlighting your academic background, relevant experience, and technical skills

Team

Current

PhD students

• 2025, Yiru Chen, 'When words are not enough: Emotional spillovers from Fed Chair communication to global financial markets', Second supervisor (with Prof Muhammad Ali Nasir)
• 2024, Yao Wang, 'Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making', Primary supervisor (with Dr Sajid Siraj, Prof Peter Ayton)
• 2022, Siran Wang, 'Social media language and problem gambling behaviour', Primary supervisor (with Dr Joshua Weller)

Research interns

• Riley Lynch, Laidlaw Scholar Research Programme (06-09/2026)
• Anastasia Asres, Laidlaw Scholar Research Programme (06-09/2026)

Alumni

• 2026, PhD, Dr Junhao Liang, 'Credit Scoring with Advanced Deep Learning Techniques', now Machine Learning Engineer at University of Leeds
• 2022, Research assistant, Jaejin Lee (01/2022-08/2022), Predicting inequality from digital textual data
• 2022, Research assistant, Zhengfa Zhang (01/2022-08/2022), Predicting inequality from digital textual data
• 2021, Research intern, Tony George, Q-step Research Placement (07-08/2021)
• 2021, Research intern, Jessica Hammond (secondary school student at Elliott Hudson College), Nuffield Research Placement (07-08/2021)

Grant

• 06/2026-09/2026, Primary supervisor, 'UK Corporate Accountability Under the Microscope: A Data-Driven Analysis of Modern Slavery Statements', £6,000 for two funded student research placements, The Laidlaw Foundation
• 12/2025-07/2026, PI, 'Embedding inclusive PI leadership in doctoral training', £14,882, Research England
• 10/2025-10/2027, Academic advisor, Knowledge transfer partnerships(KTP) with SR Mailing, on the project of 'LLM-enhanced decision support system for the sustainable packaging', £338,916, Innovate UK.
• 05/2024-05/2026, Academic advisor, Knowledge transfer partnerships(KTP) with Katchr on the project of 'AI-Powered financial intelligence dashboard for legal sector services', £324,129, Innovate UK.
• 09/2023-09/2027, Primary supervisor, Collaborative Award, White Rose DTP, "Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making" to recruit a 4-year fully funded PhD student (international rates, equivalent to £150,166), ESRC
• 02/2022-06/2023, PI, "LINK: Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data - a multidisciplinary network between UK and South Korea", £45,758, ESRC
• 01/2022-08/2022, PI, "Predicting inequality from digital textual data", £21,467, LUBS Challenge Fund
• 07/2021-08/2021, PI, "Sentiment analysis from unstructured text and image data: a study to understand consumer emotion on laundry products", £4,175 for two funded student research placements, The Nuffield Foundation
• 02/2019-11/2020, PI, "Visual analytics on CEO profile images in initial coin offerings (ICO)" , £2,000, University of Leeds
• 02/2017-11/2017, PI, "Image pre-processing for automatic face recognition in forensics applications", £37,500, Metropolitan Police Service

Publication

Journal

1. 2025, J. Liang, X. Wei, B. Summers, "Tabular Image: a method to convert tabular data to images for convolutional neural networks", Annals of Operations Research (ABS3) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
2. 2024, A. Bayat, M. Goergen, P. Koutroumpis, X. Wei, "The impact of CEO political ideology on labor cost reductions and payout decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic", Journal of Corporate Finance (ABS4) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
3. 2024, V. Giannetti, J. Chen and X. Wei, "Actors' Facial Similarity and its Impact on U.S. Movies' Box-Office Performance in East and South-East Asia", International Marketing Review (ABS3) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
4. 2022, W. Huang, S. Vismara and X. Wei, "Confidence and Capital Raising", Journal of Corporate Finance (ABS4) [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
5. 2020, Y. Liu, M. Hultman, A. B. Eisingerich, X. Wei. "How Does Brand Loyalty Interact with Tourism Destination? Exploring the Effect of Brand Loyalty on Place Attachment", Annals of Tourism Research (ABS4). [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
6. 2018, A. Doukani, X. Wei, B. Kader, F. Soazandry, & B. Inkser (2018). "Views From the Street Pilot Study: Constraints and Difficulties of Using Photographs in Research of a Complex Nature Such as Homelessness", Biomedical Informatics Insights. [PDF] [DOI] [Bibtex]
7. 2017, G. Zhao, Y. Ge, B. Shen, X. Wei, and H. Wang, "Emotion Analysis for Personality Inference from EEG Signals", IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (Impact factor: 13.99), Dec. 2017 [Bibtex] [PDF]
8. 2014, X. Wei, C.-T. Li, Z. Lei, D. Yi, Stan Z. Li, "Dynamic Image-to-Class Warping for Occluded Face Recognition", IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) (Impact factor: 7.231), vol. 9, no. 12, Dec. 2014 [Bibtex] [PDF] [Code]
9. 2014, Y. Guan, X. Wei, and C.-T. Li, "On the Generalization Power of Face and Gait in Gender Recognition", International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics (IJDCF), vol. 6, no. 1, Jan. 2014 [Bibtex] [PDF] (Winner of the 2014 IGI Global's Excellence in Research Journal Award)

Peer-reviewed Conference (Proceeding)

1. 2018, H. Wang, X. Wei, V. Sanchez and C.-T. Li, "Fusion Network for Face-Based Age Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Oct., 2018, Greece [Bibtex] [PDF]
2. 2017, X. Wei and D. Stillwell, "How smart does your profile image look? Estimating intelligence from social network profile images", ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Feb., 2017, UK [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides] [Poster]
3. 2016, X. Wei*, J. Palomaki*, J. Yan and P. Robinson, "The Science and Detection of Tilting", ACM International Conference in Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), Jun., 2016, US (*denotes equal contribution) [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]
4. 2015, B.-B. Liu, X. Wei and J. Yan, "Enhancing sensor pattern noise for source camera identification: an empirical evaluation", ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSEC), Jun., 2015, US [Bibtex] [PDF]
5. 2014, Y. Guan, X. Wei, C.-T. Li, and Y. Keller, "People Identification and Tracking through Fusion of Facial and Gait Features", Invited Paper, International Workshop on Biometrics (BIOMET), Jun., 2014, Bulgaria [Bibtex] [PDF]
6. 2014, X. Lin, X. Wei and C.-T. Li, "Two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images", IS&T/SPIE Conference on Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics, Feb., 2014, US [Bibtex] [PDF]
7. 2013, Y. Guan, X. Wei, C.-T. Li, G. L. Marcialis, F. Roli and M. Tistarelli, "Combining Gait and Face for Tackling the Elapsed Time Challenges" IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS), Sep. 2013, US [Bibtex] [PDF]
8. 2013, X. Wei and C.-T. Li, "Fixation and Saccade based Face Recognition from Single Image per Person with Various Occlusions and Expressions", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop on Biometrics (CVPRW), Jun. 2013, US [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]
9. 2013, X. Wei, C.-T. Li and Y. Hu, "Face Recognition with Occlusion Using Dynamic Image-to-Class Warping (DICW)", IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), Apr. 2013, China [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides] [Poster] [Code]
10. 2013, X. Wei, C.-T. Li and Y. Hu, "Robust Face Recognition with Occlusions in both Reference and Query Images", International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF), Apr. 2013, Portugal [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]
11. 2012, X. Wei, C.-T. Li and Y. Hu, "Robust Face Recognition under Varying Illumination and Occlusion considering Structured Sparsity", International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), Dec. 2012, Australia [Bibtex] [PDF] [Slides]

Book Chapter

1. 2016, X. Wei and C.-T. Li, "Face Recognition Technologies for Evidential Evaluation of Video Traces", Handbook of Biometrics for Forensic Science, ed. by M. Tistarelli and C. Champod, Springer (in press) [Bibtex] [PDF]
2. 2015, B. Arbab-Zavar, X. Wei, J.D. Bustard, M.S. Nixon and C.-T. Li, "On Forensic Use of Biometrics", Handbook of Digital Forensics of Multimedia Data and Devices, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.[Bibtex] [PDF]

Teaching

• LUBS1086 Exploring Your Potential (2018-2019)
• LUBS2940 Business Analytics 2 (2018-2021)
• LUBS3012 Data Analytics for Business (2025-current)
• LUBS3200 Business Analytics 3: Analytics Project (2018-2022)
• LUBS5990M Machine Learning in Practice (2019-current)

Research Impact

• Our research this and this have been featured by the LUBS research blog: Revolutionising financial decision-making with emerging technologies and interdisciplinary approaches
• Our research project 'Digital footprints for climate change insight' has been featured by the Further Together campaign of the University
• Selected media coverage around our research How smart does your profile image look? Estimating intelligence from social network profile images: Cambridge News, The Bold Italic, Digital Trends, Techspot, Fusion. Attention score:

Professional Activity

Editorial service

• 2023, Editorial Board Member, Discover Analytics
• 2022, Special Issue Editor, "Connecting Data, People, and Artificial Intelligence toward Smart and Personalized Healthcare", A special issue of Sensors
• 2015-2018, Associate Editor, International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics (IJDCF)

External PhD examiner

• 2025, Dr. Rui Zheng, 'Data-driven modelling and inference for quantifying the effect of social influence in decision-making', University of Manchester
• 2023, Dr. Trung Thanh Dang, 'Enhancing intraday stock prediction and trading with social media sentiment using deep learning', University of Hull
• 2021, Dr. Samadhi Poornima Kumarasinghe Wickrama Arachchilage, 'Adaptive Domain Learning for Improved Face Recognition', Queen Mary University of London

External mentor

• 2021-present, Research mentor for PostDoc, University of Cambridge, UK

Invited Talk

• 2026, Panel discussion, "From Strategy to Delivery - Transforming the Department for Work and Pensions", Department for Work and Pensions, UK
• 2023, Invited talk, "Analysing Automobile Recalls using Text Mining", Big Data seminar, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France
• 2022, Panel discussion, "Promoting the culture of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI): impacts of research to society." Designing human resource management (HRM) practices to support NHS staff of minority ethnic backgrounds project workshop, UK
• 2022, Invited talk, "Unstructured data mining in finance applications.", ABCP Annual Conference, UK
• 2021, Invited talk, "How digital images affect audience perceptions", Leeds Digital Festival, UK
• 2021, Invited talk, "Psychological Profile Analysis via Digital Footprints", Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
• 2020, Invited talk, "Can we judge a book by its cover? confidence and capital raising in ICO", University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China
• 2019, Invited talk and panel discussion, "Text and image analytics in supply chain", Ideas in Practice Supply Chain Summit 2019, UK
• 2018, Collaborative research discussion, "Data scraping for real-time economic indicators", The Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, UK
• 2017, Short course of two lectures, "Computational visual analysis techniques", University of Science and Technology Beijing, China
• 2017, Invited speaker on "Do you fit in your business school? University personality study from social media", The Jingshi Conference on Educational Data Mining and Applications, China
• 2017, Panel discussion on "Technology & methodologies in digital mental health", Innovation & Strategies for Digital Interventions in Mental Health, UK

Conference and Workshop Organisation

• 2025, Workshop Speaker, WebText2Insight: An Introductory Workshop to Applied Web Scraping, NLP and GenAI for Business Research, UK
• 2023, Workshop Chair, 13th EAI International Conference on Big Data Technologies and Applications, UK
• 2022, Session Chair, Entrepreneurial Finance (ENTFIN) Association Annual Meeting 2022, UK
• 2017, Track Chair (Identification through Data Mining), The 16th Australian Data Mining Conference(AusDM), Australia
• 2017, Session Chair, Workshop on Hybrid Human-Machine Computing (HHMC), UK
• 2017, Workshop leader, "View from the street: visual literacy and digital photographic analysis for helping homeless people", Innovation & Strategies for Digital Interventions in Mental Health, UK

Program Committees Member

• 2017, Workshop on Hybrid Human-Machine Computing (HHMC), UK
• 2017, International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF), UK
• 2016, International Conference on Advances in Signal, Image and Video Processing (SIGNAL), Portugal
• 2015, International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing (IIH-MSP), Australia
• 2014, International Conference in Information Security and Digital Forensics (ISDF), Greece
• 2014, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), China

Personal

Hair Donation

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