Education
Master of Science in Applied Computing
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto, 2023 - 2025
B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Beihang University, 2019 - 2023
Publications
CrossKeys: Text Entry for Virtual Reality Using a Single Controller via Wrist Rotation
Zhaoxun Liu*, Xiaolong Liu, Lili Wang
International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (IJHCI), 2024
Hands-Free Is Fine: Gaze-Dominant Object Manipulation in Virtual Reality
Zhaoxun Liu*, Xiaolong Liu, Lili Wang
Journal of Beihang University, 2023 (Undergraduate Thesis)
Temporal Transformer Networks with Self-Supervision for Action Recognition
Yongkang Zhang, Jun Li, Na Jiang, Guoming Wu, Han Zhang, Zhiping Shi, Zhaoxun Liu*, Zizhang Wu
IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT), 2023
Industrial
University Health Network - Team Lead, Machine Learning
February 2025 - PRESENT
- I lead the Machine Learning Research Team at the SARA Lab, UHN, overseeing research in computer vision, graphics, and reinforcement learning. I also supervise healthcare-tailored game development and web application projects.
- Our mission is to pioneer AI-driven solutions for surgical and clinical applications.
University Health Network - Machine Learning Researcher
May 2024 - December 2024
- Introduced MasTER, a data-intensive triage dashboard with a user-friendly human interface to enable fast patient dispatch in mass-casualty incidents by leveraging PPO-based deep reinforcement learning and large language models.
Ubisoft - Intern Gameplay Programmer
September 2022 - March 2023
- Researched reinforcement learning (DQN, DDPG) on non-player character actions, behaviours, and interactions.
- Assassin’s Creed Mirage downloadable contents (DLCs), excelling in C# and Unity3D and performance optimization.
- Achieved notable improvements in DLC performance and functionality, streamlined project workflows with Perforce and Confluence, and successfully delivered high-quality content.
Academic
Dynamic Graphics Project - Graduate Student
January 2024 - April 2024
- Proposed DocHub, a LLM-based interactive system that identifies and visualizes crucial data and their interconnections within documents as node-link diagrams.
- Offered an interactive interface allowing users to modify these visualizations for tailored insights and to pose detailed, context-specific queries for deeper understanding.
- Featured a non-linear abstraction framework to adeptly handle and streamline the complexity of information presented.
Computational Social Science Lab - Graduate Student
September 2023 - December 2023
- Presented a pretrained language model-based framework to detect and reason about entities targeted by hateful memes.
- Provided insight into why certain groups are more susceptible to becoming targets of hateful memes.
- Proposed a specific preventive measure to curb the spread of hateful memes.
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems - Researcher
February 2023 - June 2023
- We proposed a hands-free object manipulation method based on gaze-dominant interaction, which significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art gaze-based hands-free object manipulation method.
- We designed a novel user study, facilitating a quantitative evaluation of the efficiency of the proposed method.
XDiscovery Lab, Dartmouth College - Intern Researcher
May 2022 - September 2022
- Devised a novel text entry method that composes scattered keywords into a natural and clear sentence, which may help exaggerate the importance of human factors in studying natural language processing by, in this particular project, observing how people consider keywords.
- Designed and developed a keyword extractor using BERT from huggingface.io.
- Retrained the model based on the prompt-based approach to give three different semantic candidate sentences.
- Developed a web application to enable more people to participate in our user study. Designed and implemented the UI with React framework. Stored data in MongoDB and used ExpressJS as the backend framework.
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems - Researcher
September 2021 - February 2022
- Led the team to devise CrossKeys, a novel and efficient text entry technique for virtual reality (VR) using a single controller via wrist rotation, which unprecedentedly employs the three-dimensional space a virtual environment can provide and outperforms the state-of-the-art method.
- Implemented responsive components, auto-completing prediction algorithm, user interface design, ergonomics-mathematical deduction, and 3D modeling.
State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment - Intern Researcher
March 2021 - December 2021
- Developed Cross-Attention ReID, a state-of-the-art approach to realizing pedestrians’ re-identification based on training with large-scale datasets generated by single-channeled IR cameras and three-channeled RGB cameras.
- Surveyed literature and applied existing theories to code with high performance and robustness.
- Conducted quantitative analysis and results assessment with datasets like SYSU-MM01 and RegDB.
BNRist, Tsinghua University - Intern Researcher
October 2020 - January 2021
- Implemented unsupervised training via differentiable renderers.
- Conducted quantitative analysis with PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and cross-datasets tests with datasets like Basel Face Model and 3DMM Face Model.
Services
CSC207: Software Design
Teaching Assistant
University of Toronto, September 2024 - December 2024
CSC404: Video Game Design
Teaching Assistant
University of Toronto, January 2024 - April 2024
CSC165: Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science
Teaching Assistant
University of Toronto, January 2024 - April 2024
Data Structure
Teaching Assistant
Beihang University, February 2021 - July 2021
Skills
Note: I think this section is silly, but every company seems to require one.