keynote speakers / 主旨报告专家

 

Prof. Youmin Xi

Executive President of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool
Senior Professor of Management at Xi'an Jiaotong University

Biography: Executive President of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, and Senior Professor of Management at Xi'an Jiaotong University. Through logical training in physics at the undergraduate level, a holistic perspective from systems engineering at the master’s level, and a humanistic approach in management at the doctoral level, Professor Xi Youmin founded the Theory of HeXie Management (1985). He led the establishment and innovative development of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (2006), with a continued dedication to management and education. He has published over 30 books, more than 300 papers, received over 10 provincial and ministerial-level awards for research achievements, supervised nearly 200 graduate students, and earned numerous national honours, including the “China Youth Scientist Award.” He also serves as Co-President of the Chinese Society for Management Modernization and Chair of the Ministry of Education's Business Administration Education Steering Committee.

 

Prof. Xiaojun Zhang

Chief Officer of Education at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Team Leader of Entrepreneur College (Taicang) Collective Leadership Team, Executive Dean of the Academy of Future Education, Principal Fellow of Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) in UK
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Biography: Dr Xiaojun Zhang got his PhD degree at Xi’an Jiaotong University. He joined Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as the Deputy Director of Institute of Leadership and Education Advanced Development (ILEAD) in 2013, which was created by him under the support of university leaders. Now Xiaojun is Chief Officer of Education at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Team Leader of Entrepreneur College (Taicang) Collective Leadership Team. He also takes roles including inaugural Executive Dean of the Academy of Future Education, and Acting Dean of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Hub.

Xiaojun is an edupreneur who initiated all the four units within the Academy of Future Education. He was appointed as Head of ILEAD in 2017 when ILEAD became a department of Education. He restructured the faculty development centre at XJTLU and built the team of Educational Development Unit (EDU) in 2018. The Department of Educational Studies (EDS) was created by Xiaojun in 2019, and Learning Institute for Future Excellence (LIFE), as an innovative platform to support student transformation and global citizenship competence development at XJTLU, was created by him in 2021.

Dr Zhang led the development of several projects with national level impact. He created XJTLU National University Teaching Innovation Award in 2016, developed the Association for Sustainable Faculty Development in Higher Education in 2018 with more than 90 institutional members, and initiated the ILEAD Talk series established in more than 20 cities in China. Since August 2023, Xiaojun was appointed as Chief Officer of Education to lead on the educational development and innovation at XJTLU, and in particular to facilitate the exploration of syntegrative education as team leader of XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang).

Dr Zhang is a Principal Fellow of Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) in UK.

One of Xiaojun’s current work focuses on educating the educators in universities, including teachers, professionals, and institutional leaders and managers. He has developed many professional development programmes for educational practitioners across the country. His programmes were attended by more than 15,000 staff from more than 500 Chinese universities. Since 2013 he has been invited for more than 200 speeches for educational practitioners and researchers on the topic of education and teaching innovation. Xiaojun created one of the most influential community for teaching innovation in China: XJTLU National University Teaching Innovation Award. More than 4,250 innovative teachers from 500 Chinese universities applied for this award since 2016. Every year there are millions of online visits to this events, and there has accumulated more than 500 excellent teaching innovation cases.

Dr Zhang’s research area includes institutional change and institutional logics; Educational leadership; Internationalization in Higher Education, especially the Sino-foreign Cooperative universities; Future education in the AI era; Syntegrative Education; University transformation and teaching innovation, in particular research-led learning and teaching; student-centred education; student transition etc. Dr Zhang welcomes PhD applications in these areas.

Xiaojun has published more than 100 academic papers and 5 books. His research focus on problems in practice and pay attention to practical implications. Most of his research has been adopted in his training programmes for higher education practitioners. One of his most recent books titled "University Transformation: From Teacher Dominated to Student-Centred" published by Tsinghua University Press is a guidebook for education practitioners who want to transform their education. Xiaojun proposed the "diamond model" of teaching innovation in AI era and highlighted ten key directions of teaching innovation in his another recently published book "Future-oriented Teaching Innovation" by Economic and Management Press.

 

Prof. Tak-Wai Chan
National Chair Professor at National Central University
National Central University, Taiwan, China

Biography: Tak-Wai Chan is a National Chair Professor at National Central University in Taiwan. A visionary in the field of digital learning, he originated the concept of AI learning companions and developed a prototype in 1988. By 1992, he built the world's first dedicated networked learning system for collaborative learning and competitive learning games. In 2000, he established EduCity, the largest online learning community in the world, reaching 1.5 million users by 2004. In the 2000s, he was at the forefront of research on intelligent classrooms, one-to-one technology-enhanced learning, and mobile learning. Collaborating with international researchers, he proposed the notion of Seamless Learning in 2006, describing the crucial impact of the Internet on learning. To support the long-term transformation of Asian education from examination-driven to interest and creation-driven, he developed the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) Theory with Asian scholars in 2018. Recently, in response to the rising frequency of global conflicts and unprecedented challenges confronting humankind, he has been promoting the concept of Global Harwell (a term combining 'harmony' and 'wellbeing') alongside international researchers, as a possible universally shared educational goal. Moreover, he proposed the General Artificial Companions Hypothesis as the paramount goal and a grand challenge of AI technology for humanity. Additionally, over his career, Chan has been building various platforms for researchers and practitioners. He was a key co-founder of the ICCEs conference series in 1993 and the GCCCEs in 1997, playing a pivotal role in establishing APSCE in 2004 and GCSCE in 1999, along with their official journals RPTEL in 2006 and JLCE in 2014. As this field continues to grow, he has advocated recently for the development of APSCE’s international theme-based conference series, in addition to the ICCE conference series. So far, his colleagues have established APSCE CTE-STEM, APSCE ICFULL, APSCE MetaACES, and APSCE ICLEA. In Taiwan, he founded the Graduate Institute of Network Learning Technology at National Central University in 2002, the Association for Reading for Tomorrow in 2016, and a mini experimental school based on IDC Theory in 2017. Furthermore, over the past ten years, he advocated for community building among local researchers by forming diverse Special Interest Groups (SIGs), which focus on different themes of digital learning research.

 

Prof. Witold Pedrycz
IEEE Life Fellow
Editor-in-Chief of Information Sciences
Editor-in-Chief of WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Wiley)
Co-editor-in-Chief of Int. J. of Granular Computing (Springer) and J. of Data Informat
University of Alberta, Canada

Biography: Witold Pedrycz (IEEE Life Fellow) is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is also with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. Dr. Pedrycz is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is a recipient of several awards including Norbert Wiener award from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, IEEE Canada Computer Engineering Medal, a Cajastur Prize for Soft Computing from the European Centre for Soft Computing, a Killam Prize, a Fuzzy Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and 2019 Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society.
His main research directions involve Computational Intelligence, Granular Computing, and Machine Learning.

 

Prof. Eng Gee Lim
Fellow of IET, Fellow of and Engineers Australia
Inaugural School Dean of Advanced Technology, Inaugural Director of AI University Research Centre
Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Biography: Professor Eng Gee Lim received the BEng(Hons) and PhD degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the UK. Prof. Lim worked for Andrew Ltd, a leading communications systems company in the United Kingdom from 2002 to 2007. Since August 2007, Prof. Lim has been at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University, where he was formally the head of EEE department and Associate Vice President (Research and Impact). Now, he is inaugural School Dean of Advanced Technology, inaugural director of AI university research centre and also professor in department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He has published over 300 refereed international journals and conference papers. His research interests are Artificial Intelligence, robotics, AI+ Health care, Future Education, Management in Higher Education, international Standard (ISO/ IEC) in Robotics, antennas, RF/microwave engineering, EM measurements/simulations, energy harvesting, power/energy transfer, smart-grid communication; wireless communication networks for smart and green cities. He is a charter engineer and Fellow of both IET and Engineers Australia. In addition, he is also a senior member of IEEE and Senior Fellow of HEA.

 

Assoc. Prof. Henk Huijser
Lead Co-Editor of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Biography: Henk Huijser is an Associate Professor and Strategic Lead Educator Development and Recognition in the Learning and Teaching Unit at Queensland University of Technology. He has been an academic developer since 2005 in Australia, the Middle East and China. Henk is a Lead Co-Editor of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology and an Associate Editor of the International Journal for Academic Development. He is Co-Author of Problem-based Learning into the Future (2017) and Co-Editor of Student Support Services (2022) and Technology-Enhanced Learning and the Virtual University (2023).

 

Assoc. Prof. Gurpinder Singh Lalli
Editor-in-Chief for European Journal of Education (Wiley), PFHEA
University of Wolverhampton, UK

Biography: Dr Gurpinder Singh Lalli is an Associate Professor in Education for Social Justice and Inclusion in the School of Education. He has an international track record of delivering funded research projects focused on inequality, inclusion, social justice and inequity in education. Gurpinder is an award winning researcher and has authored 4 books. These include Schools, Food and Social Learning (Routledge, 2019), School Farms: Feeding and educating children (Routledge, 2021), Schools, Space and Culinary Capital (Routledge, 2022) and Food Futures in Education and Society (Routledge, 2023). Gurpinder is Editor-in-Chief for European Journal of Education (Wiley), book series editor for Food and Cultures from the Global South (Peter Lang Publishing) and Sociological Perspectives on Food & Culture (Berghahn).

University profile website: https://researchers.wlv.ac.uk/Glalli

 

Dr. Jinhee Kim
Consultant at the UNESCO International Bureau of Education in Switzerland, Program Specialist at the APEC e-Learning Training Center in South Korea and Central American Bank for Economic Integration in Honduras
Old Dominion University, USA

Biography: Dr. Jinhee Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) program at the Darden College of Education and Professional Studies. Before joining the faculty of ODU, she worked as a faculty at the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, a consultant at the UNESCO International Bureau of Education in Switzerland, a program specialist at the APEC e-Learning training center in South Korea and Central American Bank for Economic Integration in Honduras.

Dr. Kim has research interests that intersect with the fields of learning sciences, human-computer interaction in education, instructional design, and education for international development, focusing on how to facilitate meaningful learning with advanced technologies. She is particularly interested in four research areas: (1) AI in Education, (2) Learning and teaching analytics, (3) Student-centered learning, and (4) Technology for Education and Development. Her ongoing projects include the students-AI interaction process on learning tasks, teacher-AI team-teaching, AI for supporting multigrade classrooms in rural schools, AI for orchestrating socially shared regulation, and the development of multimodal predictive modeling of students’ emotional responses. Her work has been published in major international academic journals such as Computer and Education, Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D), British Journal of Educational Technology, Journal of the Learning Sciences, Education and Information Technologies, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, and Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

 

Assoc. Prof. Na Li
ICAIE 2025 Conference Chair, Director of Digital Education, Co-Director of Research Centre for AI and Education, Academy of Future Education
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Biography: Dr Na Li is the conference chair of ICAIE 2025. She is an Associate Professor, Director of the MSc Digital Education Programme in the Department of Educational Studies, and Co-director of the Research Centre for AI and Education within the Academy of Future Education at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. As a Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA), Associate Editor of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) and the European Journal of Education (EJED) and Editorial Board Member of the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET), and a leading guest editor for BJET’s 2024-2025 special issue on AI and emotions in education, guest editor for Developing Academic Practice (DAP)’s 2024-2025 special issue on AI in learning and teaching, her research focusing on interdisciplinary studies and educational technology innovations such as Virtual Learning environments (VLE/LMS), Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), and Digital Game-based Learning (DGBL). Research profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Na-Li-120