CI³ Lab Director

Professor Xiao LI is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Xiao’s research mainly contributes to smart and industrialized construction, which includes assembly systems, production systems, and smart work packaging methodology for collaborative planning and control in construction.

He obtained his BEng (2009-2013) and MEng (2013-2016) from Chongqing University and did his PhD at HKPolyU (2016-2019). After one year of industry experience at Qianhai, Shenzhen (2019-2020), he returned as an RGC postdoctoral fellow at HKU (2020-2021) and research assistant professor at HKPolyU (2021-2022). He has authored 60+ papers in peer-reviewed academic journals with 6,095 citations. He is a Top 1% Scholar by Clarivate Analytics and World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University, a fellow of the SYLFF Association, a National Registered Construction Engineer (Class 1), a member of the HKIE, ASCE, IEEE, and CIB, and guest editors of several leading journals in construction engineering and management. He held several international academic awards, including the 49th Geneva Inventions Gold Medal, CIC Innovation Award, SYLFF Research Grant Award/Research Abroad Award, and CIB Sebestyén Future Leaders Award, as well as the Best Paper Award of CIB/ASCE/CRIOCM/CIOB(HK).

He led various research projects (over HK$20 million) in the following fields: 

• Blockchain and distributed collaboration in inspection planning and safety monitoring
• Human-robot collaboration-based production robotics system in modular construction
• Collaborative robots for the assembly process in modular construction
• Interactive configuration for modular buildings
• Maintenance optimization for modular buildings
• Multi-stakeholder cross-regional collaboration in construction
• Intelligent and distributed carbon monitoring system in modular construction