Biography
I am a faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology, specializing in Large Language Models (LLMs), deep learning, agentic AI, and social chatbots. Previously, I served as an Associate Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and as an Assistant Professor and Ph.D. advisor at Tsinghua University. I earned my Ph.D. from RWTH Aachen University under Prof. Hermann Ney, with research visits to Microsoft Research and IBM Watson. My work includes approximately 50 publications, 12 patents and provisional patents, and contributions to 18 top-ranking teams in major NLP competitions, including second place in the Amazon Alexa Prize Social Bot Challenge.
Publications
System Description of ICT/Dublin NIST-15 Machine Translation System
J. Xu
June 2015, Workshop of Open Machine Translation
Synchronous Learning of Chinese Word Segmentation and Word Alignment
J. Xu, J. Gao, K. Toutanova and H. Ney
2011, Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation (Book chapter)
A Computational Model for Sound Processing in the Human Auditory System
J. Xu
November 2002, Dissertation of Master of Computer Science
Competitions
Funding
eBay Research Grant
Principal Investigator. Project: Retailer Linked Dialogues: Chatting, Carting, and Caring.
CCDC Quantum-AI Project
Co-PI. Project on Quantum Technology Assisted with AI.
Amazon Alexa Prize Grant
Principal Investigator. Project: Never Alone with Me (NAM).
NSF CRAFT Pilot
Principal Investigator. Project: Center for Research toward Advanced Financial Technologies (CRAFT).
NSF CARTA
NSF CARTA Grant
Co-PI. Project: Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (IUCRC Phase I,
Rutgers).
Grant No. 1747728
NSF-China (NSFC) Grant
Co-PI. Project: Key Problems for Tightly-Coupled, Multi-Signal Fusion-based SLAM.
Grant No.
61672524
ICT-CAS Innovation Grant
Principal Investigator. Project: Ensemble Learning in Machine Translation.
Grant No.
20156020
KLIIP-ICT
KLIIP-ICT-CAS Grant
Principal Investigator. Project: Novel Machine Learning Methods.
Grant No. 20156020
NSFC Grant
NSFC Grant on Reasoning
Co-PI. Project: New Approaches to the Limits of Efficient Propositional
Reasoning.
Grant No. 20131351464
IIIS-Tsinghua Internal Grant
Principal Investigator. Project: Machine Learning and Machine Translation.
Teaching
Quantum Machine Learning 810
Graduate course on quantum-enhanced machine learning methods.
Deep Learning Competition 810
Graduate course.
Deep Learning CS 583
Graduate course.
Deep Learning CS 583
Graduate course.
Data Structures CS 284D
Graduate course.
Deep Learning CS 583A
Graduate course.
Data Structures CS 284D
Undergraduate course.
Deep Learning 583B
Graduate course.
Deep Learning CSCI 79522 & 49377
Graduate & Undergraduate course.
Natural Language Processing C-SC 74040
Graduate course.
Supervised Research CSCI 49600
Undergraduate course.
Language Technology CSCI 49362
Undergraduate course.
Research
Individual Study C-SC 79000 35822
Graduate course.
Language Technology CSCI 49362
Graduate course.
Supervised Research CSCI 49600
Undergraduate course.
Research
Individual Study C-SC 79000 35822
Graduate course.
Software Design and Analysis III CSCI 33500
Undergraduate course.
Language Technology CSCI 49362
Undergraduate course.
Research
Individual Study C-SC 79000 35822
Graduate course.
Supervised Research CSCI 49600
Undergraduate course.
Natural Language Processing C-SC 74040
Graduate course.
Language Technology LING 83600 32100
Graduate course.
Software Analysis and Design I CSCI 13500
Undergraduate course.
Machine Learning and Translation
Graduate course.
Speech & ML
Speech Communication for Humans & Machines
Undergraduate course, co-taught with multiple professors.
Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition
Undergraduate course.
ML & Translation
Machine Learning and Translation
Undergraduate course.
Language Tech
Language Technology
Graduate course, co-taught with Hans Uszkoreit and Martin Kay.
Patents
Patent 1
Latent Concept Analysis Method
Hassan Sajjad, Fahim Dalvi, Firoj Alam, Nadir Durrani, Abdul Rafae Khan, and Jia Xu
Patent 2
Unsupervised Chinese Word Segmentation for Statistical Machine Translation
Jianfeng Gao, Kristina Nikolova Toutanova, and Jia Xu
Invited Talks
SIT
NYU
CUNY GC
JSALT
MTMA
Google Research NYC
Columbia University
University of Washington
USC
CWMT
RWTH-Aachen University
Aarhus University
Stanford University
Current Students
Abdul Rafae Khan
Postdoctoral researcher at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Nikhil Reddy
Ph.D. student at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Joao Luis Lins
Ph.D. student (Full-time Researcher at Meta from May 2025).
Hongbo Liu
Ph.D. student (co-advised) at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Ella Crabtree
M.Sc. student at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Shudhanshu Ranjan
M.Sc. student at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Nikhil Naik
M.Sc. student at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Alumni
Mengjiao Zhang (Stevens)
Thesis: Privacy in Federated Learning
Now at Microsoft
Xuting Tang (Stevens)
Thesis: Trust in the AI-R
Now at ICE
Abdul Khan (CUNY GC)
Thesis: Robust Neural Machine Translation
Now at Stevens
Cuong Huang
Cuong Huang (CUNY)
Thesis: (Research) Quality Estimation
Now at Amazon
Abhijeet Gusain (Stevens)
Thesis: Chatbot for Student Mental Health
Now at Meta
Yeshwanth Reddy (Stevens)
Thesis: Reducing the Randomness in Chatbot Evaluation with Test-retest Match
Now at InfoSys
Madhuri Paluri (Stevens)
Thesis: Efficient Sub-sentence Classification
Now at Minnesota Government Agency
Md Kowsher (Stevens)
Thesis: Efficient Machine Learning Methods
Sattvik Sahai (Stevens)
Thesis: Pairwise Tracklet Association for Long-term Multiple Object
Now at Amazon
Sejal Vyas (Stevens)
Thesis: Cross-domain Machine Translation
Now at Barclays
Geliang Chen
Geliang Chen (Tsinghua)
Thesis: Phrase-based Language Model for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT)
Xiaojun Zhang
Xiaojun Zhang (U. Saarland)
Thesis: Two-level Parallel Text Extraction from Comparable Corpora
Now at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Nan Chen
Nan Chen (Stevens)
Thesis: Efficiency and Security Calls Out Graph Partition Schemes in Federated Learning
Now at Yuanfudao
Yong Cheng
Yong Cheng (NJTU)
Thesis: Analysis of User Behaviors in Social Network
Now at Google
Shun Zheng
Shun Zheng (BUPT)
Thesis: Improvements on Word Alignment Models in SMT
Now at Microsoft
Zhengping Che (Tsinghua)
Thesis: Dirichlet Process Model for Phrase-based MT
Now at Midea Group
Yulong Zeng
Yulong Zeng (Tsinghua)
Thesis: A Comparative Study of Generative Model and Discriminative Model
Now at YeeZ Technology
Zhibo Zhang
Zhibo Zhang (Tsinghua)
Thesis: Machine Learning-based Crime Prediction
