Home – CI³Lab

About CI³Lab

We are a team of dedicated researchers who specialize in CI³ at HKU.

The CI³ Lab is directed by Dr. Xiao LI and aims to address the grand interdisciplinary challenges in construction industrialization by developing transdisciplinary approaches in construction informatics to answer the multidisciplinary scientific questions in collaborative intelligence.

Recent research areas for the vacancies:

Knowledge collaborative intelligence

language models, knowledge graphs, casualty learning, knowledge distillation, semantics enrichment in industrialized construction.

Collaborative scheduling

reinforcement learning combinatorial/stochastic/heuristic-based optimization for production/project scheduling in industrialized construction.

Distributed collaboration

Advanced consensus/incentive mechanism in blockchain, federated learning, and decentralized learning for the distributed industrialized construction.

Collaborative robots

human-robot collaboration, assembly robots, production robotics systems, computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and cable-driven robots in industrialized construction.

Xiao Li

Assistant Professor
Construction Engineering and Management
The University of Hong Kong

Address: HW6-07, Haking Wong Building, The University of Hong Kong
Phone: +852 3917 2673
Fax: +852 2559 5337
Email: shell.x.li@hku.hk

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 50+ papers in peer-reviewed academic journals with 5896 citations. He is the Top 1% Scholars 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 American Society of Civil Engineers and CIB, and guest editors of several leading journals in construction engineering and management. He held several international academic awards, e.g., the 49TH Geneva Inventions Gold Medal, CIC Innovation Award, SYLFF Research Grant Award/Research Abroad Award, CIB Sebestyén Future Leaders Award, ASCE Best Paper Award, CRIOCM Best Paper Award, and CIOB (HK) Outstanding Paper Award.

He led various research projects (over HK$ 16 million) in the following fields:

Multi-stakeholder cross-regional collaboration in construction
Blockchain and distributed collaboration
Human-robot collaboration-based production robotics system
Intelligent carbon monitoring system
Assembly robot in modular construction

News

Updates on our research, projects, and team highlights.

Award ｜ CIB World Building Congress 2025

Award ｜ iCCPMCE2024

2024 Top 1% Scholars｜World’s Top 2% Scientists

Award ｜ICCREM2024

Award ｜CSIE2024

Award ｜iCaMaL2024

our Latest Research Findings

Highlighting our most recent contributions to science and technology.

Wei, Y., & Li, X. (2025). Knowledge-enhanced ontology-to-vector for automated ontology concept enrichment in BIM.

Journal of Industrial Information Integration, 100836.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2025.100836

Wei, Y., Li, X., & Petzold, F. (2025). Text-to-structure interpretation of user requests in BIM interaction.

Automation in Construction, 174, 106119.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2025.106119

Wu, C., Ding, W., Jin, Q., Jiang, J., Jiang, R., Xiao, Q., Liao, L., & Li, X. (2025). Retrieval augmented generation-driven information retrieval and question answering in construction management.

Advanced Engineering Informatics, 65, 103158.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2025.103158

Liu, Z., Li, X., Gao, Z., Zhang, Y., Teng, Y., & Wu, C. (2025). A hybrid and intuitive work packaging approach with multiple task relations, general work package precedence, and BIM in modular construction.