Haocong Rao
AI Singapore PhD Fellow
Research Scientist, CCDS, NTU
About me
Dr. Haocong Rao (饶浩聪) is currently Research Scientist at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He obtained his PhD degree with AI Singapore (AISG) Research PhD Award at NTU in 2025. His PhD supervisors are Prof. Chunyan Miao (FIEEE, Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore) and Prof. Cyril Leung (Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada). He received several faculty offers from top Chinese universities, including a tenure-track full professor position at a top-6 CS school. Prior to joining NTU, he was a researcher at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Science, where his supervisors and academic mentors were Prof. Xiping Hu, Prof. Jun Cheng, Prof. Bin Hu (FIEEE), and Prof. Victor C.M. Leung (FIEEE, FRSC, FEIC, FCAE). He received his B.Eng. degree with Outstanding Thesis Award from South China University of Technology (SCUT).
Haocong's research interests include Human Skeleton Empowered Behaviour Intelligence, Resource-Efficient Agentic AI for Healthcare, and Self-Supervised/Unsupervised learning. In 2020, the team he collaborated with initiated the first series of deep learning based skeleton-based identity recognition research, with a focus on developing more efficient, pravicy-preserving, and robust skeleton-based behavior paradigms tailored for security, healthcare, embodied AI, and sports science.
News
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Honored to receive the Rising Star Award (10 Recipients Worldwide) of The 13th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing @IEEE BESC 2026! -
Invited to serve as a Lead Guest Editor of Electronics [Impact Factor: 2.9]. I am honored to invite two experts, Schmidt AI in Science Fellow Dr. Zhengding Luo @NTU and Dr. Yongqing Jiang @SCU, to serve as Co-Guest Editors of an exciting interdisciplinary issue! -
We are organizing The 1st Agentic AI Competition, conjunction with ICCSE 2026, co-hosted with Tsinghua University, UBC, Alibaba, etc. Welcome to submit your project! -
Invited to serve as a Lead Guest Editor of Journal of Imaging [Impact Factor: 3.8], Special Issue: "Advanced Learning Paradigms and Foundation Models for Behavior Understanding" . I am honored to invite four experts, Prof. Peijun Bao @ZJU, Prof. Xuejiao Zhao @SCU, Dr. Haifeng Lu @HKU, Dr. Xingxuan Li @Apodex, USA, to serve as Co-Guest Editors! Welcome to submit your manuscripts to the journal! -
Invited to serve as a Guest/Topic Editor of Frontiers in Psychiatry [Impact Factor: 3.8], Special Issue: "Gait-Based Computational Phenotyping of Psychomotor and Affective Disturbance in Psychiatry". Welcome to submit your manuscripts to the journal! -
One paper is accepted by IJCAI 2026! [Featured in 新智元 | 机器之心 | PaperWeekly | CVer | CAAI] -
Invited to serve as an Action Editor of Frontiers in Aging [Impact Factor: 4.9]. Welcome to submit your manuscripts (AI in Aging; Musculoskeletal Aging) to the journal! -
Our latest survey " A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects" has been released! 🚀 [Featured in 新智元 | 机器之心 | CVer ] -
Honored to receive Excellent Organization Award of The 16th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science @IEEE CloudCom 2025. -
Serving as the Research Manager (Transitional) of the Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY), NTU. -
We are organizing the The 1st AI for Healthy Aging and Longevity Workshop, conjunction with AAAI 2026, now calling for papers! -
Serving as a Consultant/Visiting Researcher of China-Singapore (Jinan-NTU) Green Technology Research Institute (GreenTRI). -
Serving as the PI of a Research Project (1,000,000 CNY) of PCG Global. -
Successfully defend my PhD thesis Many thanks to my supervisors! One paper is accepted by IEEE Signal Processing Letters [IF: 3.9]! -
Serving as Publication Chair of The 16th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science @IEEE CloudCom 2025 (conjunction with IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing & The Journal of Cloud Computing by Springer), now calling for papers! -
One survey paper "A Survey of Artificial Intelligence in Gait-Based Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis" is accepted by Neurocomputing [IF: 5.5]! -
One paper is accepted by AAAI 2025! -
We are organizing the The 4th AI for Ageless Aging Workshop (AIAA) workshop, conjunction with IJCAI 2024, now calling for papers! -
One paper (LLMs for Psychology) is accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2023! -
Honored to receive Outstanding Contribution Award of European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness. -
One paper is accepted by International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) [IF: 19.5]! -
Honored to be selected as ESI Highly Cited Paper (Top 1% in Engineering Worldwide) with our IEEE TPAMI article "A Self-Supervised Gait Encoding Approach with Locality-Awareness for 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification"! -
One paper is accepted by CVPR 2023! -
One paper is accepted by IEEE Signal Processing Letters [IF: 3.9]! -
Truly honored to be selected as IEEE TPAMI Featured Cover (2022 October Issue, Top 0.2% Worldwide) with our article "A Self-Supervised Gait Encoding Approach with Locality-Awareness for 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification" ! -
Truly honored to be selected as Distinguished Program Committee (PC) Member (Top 3% Worldwide) and Outstanding Reviewer of IJCAI! -
One paper is accepted by IJCAI 2022 (Oral)! -
Truly honored to receive AI Singapore (AISG) Research PhD Fellowship Award (13 Awardees Worldwide in 2022) (Supporting a research project with 380,800 SGD in funding, combined with the top PhD scholarship in Singapore)! -
One paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) [IF: 8.2]! -
One paper is accepted by ACMMM 2021! -
One paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) [IF: 24.3]! -
One paper is accepted by IJCAI 2021 (Oral)! -
One paper is accepted by IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ) [IF: 10.2]! -
One paper is accepted by Information Sciences [IF: 8.5]! -
Truly honored to receive IEEE HealthCom Best Paper Award (The only best paper) at IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Service, 2020 with our paper "Multi-level Co-Occurrence Graph Convolutional LSTM for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition"! -
One paper is accepted by IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ) [IF: 9.5]! -
Honored to receive President Scholarship (Special Award, Top 3%) at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIAT)! One paper is accepted by IJCAI 2020 (Oral)! Truly honored to receive Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award from SCUT!
Selective Articles [Google Scholar] [ResearchGate]
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A Self-Supervised Gait Encoding Approach with Locality-Awareness for 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao*, Siqi Wang*, Xiping Hu, Mingkui Tan, Yi Guo, Jun Cheng, Xinwang Liu, Bin Hu (* Co-First Author) IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2022 [IF: 24.3] (Extension of IJCAI Paper) [First SRID Article in TPAMI] (TPAMI Featured Cover, ESI Highly Cited Paper) [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects By Haocong Rao, Chunyan Miao 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2026 [First SRID Survey] [Link] [PDF] [Resources] |
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A Survey of Artificial Intelligence in Gait-Based Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis By Haocong Rao*, Minlin Zeng*, Xuejiao Zhao, Chunyan Miao (* Co-First Author) Neurocomputing 2025 [IF: 5.5] [Link] [PDF] [Resources] |
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Motif Guided Graph Transformer with Combinatorial Skeleton Prototype Learning for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Chunyan Miao 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2025 [First SRID Paper in AAAI] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Hierarchical Skeleton Meta-Prototype Contrastive Learning with Hard Skeleton Mining for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Cyril Leung, Chunyan Miao International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 2024 [IF: 19.5] [First SRID Article in IJCV] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework By Haocong Rao, Cyril Leung, Chunyan Miao 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023 (Findings) [Link] [PDF] [Code] |
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TranSG: Transformer-Based Skeleton Graph Prototype Contrastive Learning with Structure-Trajectory Prompted Reconstruction for Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Chunyan Miao IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2023 [First SRID Paper in CVPR] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Revisiting k-Reciprocal Distance Re-ranking for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Yuan Li, Chunyan Miao IEEE Signal Processing Letters 2022 [IF: 3.9] [Link] [PDF] |
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SimMC: Simple Masked Contrastive Learning of Skeleton Representations for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Chunyan Miao 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2022 (Oral, Acceptance Rate: 14.9%) [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Skeleton Prototype Contrastive Learning with Multi-Level Graph Relation Modeling for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Chunyan Miao Arxiv Preprint (Extension of IJCAI 2021 Paper) [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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SM-SGE: A Self-Supervised Multi-Scale Skeleton Graph Encoding Framework for Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Xiping Hu, Jun Cheng, Bin Hu 29th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, ACMMM 2021 [First SRID Paper in ACMMM] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Multi-level Graph Encoding with Structural-Collaborative Relation Learning for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao, Shihao Xu, Xiping Hu, Jun Cheng, Bin Hu 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2021 (Oral, Acceptance Rate: 13.9%) [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Augmented Skeleton Based Contrastive Action Learning with Momentum LSTM for Unsupervised Action Recognition By Haocong Rao*, Shihao Xu*, Xiping Hu, Jun Cheng, Bin Hu (* Co-First Author) Information Sciences 2021 [IF: 8.5] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Internet of Things Enabled Data Fusion Method for Sleep Healthcare Applications By Fan Yang, Qilu Wu, Xiping Hu, Jiancong Ye, Yuting Yang, Haocong Rao, Rong Ma, Bin Hu IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ) 2021 [IF: 10.2] [Link] [PDF] |
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Prototypical Contrast and Reverse Prediction: Unsupervised Skeleton Based Action Recognition By Shihao Xu, Haocong Rao, Xiping Hu, Jun Cheng, Bin Hu IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) 2021 [IF: 8.2] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
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Attention based Multi-level Co-occurrence Graph Convolutional LSTM for 3D Action Recognition By Shihao Xu*, Haocong Rao*, Xiping Hu, Jun Cheng, Bin Hu (* Co-First Author) IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ) 2020 [IF: 9.5] [Link] [PDF] [Code] |
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Self-Supervised Gait Encoding with Locality-Aware Attention for Person Re-Identification By Haocong Rao*, Siqi Wang*, Xiping Hu, Mingkui Tan, Huang Da, Jun Cheng, Bin Hu. (* Co-First Author) 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2020 (Oral, Acceptance Rate: 12.6%) [First SRID Paper in IJCAI] [Link] [PDF] [Code] [Data] |
Professional Services & Teaching
- Lead Guest Editor of Journal of Imaging [Impact Factor: 3.8], SI - "Advanced Learning Paradigms and Foundation Models for Behavior Understanding"
- Guest/Topic Editor of Frontiers in Psychiatry [Impact Factor: 3.8], SI - "Gait-Based Computational Phenotyping of Psychomotor and Affective Disturbance in Psychiatry"
- Invited Action Editor of Frontiers in Aging [Impact Factor: 4.9]
- Guest/Topic Editor of Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience [Impact Factor: 3.3], Research Topic - "AI-Enhanced Computational Tools for Early Detection of Mental and Neurological Disorders"
- Organizing Committee (Publication Chair) of the 16th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science @IEEE CloudCom 2025
- Program Committee (PC) Member of IJCAI, AAAI
- Co-Organizer/Cooperator and PC Member of
The 1st AI for Healthy Aging and Longevity Workshop @AAAI 2026
- Co-Organizer/Cooperator and PC Member of
The 4th AI for Ageless Aging Workshop @IJCAI 2024
- Co-Organizer/Cooperator and PC Member of
The 3rd AI for Ageless Aging Workshop @IJCAI 2023
- Organizing Team Member of
The 6th International Conference on Crowd Science and Engineering @ICCSE 2023
- Co-Host, Co-Organizer/Cooperator, and PC Member of
The 2nd AI for Cognitive and Physical Frailty Seminar @IJCAI 2022
- Nature Communications, Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), Reviewer
- International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), Reviewer
- Pattern Recognition (PR), Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), Reviewer
- IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI), Reviewer
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ), Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAC), Reviewer
- Artificial Intelligence Review, Reviewer
- Expert Systems with Applications, Reviewer
- CZ3004 Multi-disciplinary Design Project, Teaching Assistant, NTU, 2022 Fall
- SC1003 Introduction to Computational Thinking and Programming, Teaching Assistant, NTU, 2023 Fall
Representative Projects
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Principle Investigator of an Industrial Research Project (1,000,000 CNY). -
Project Lead (Awardee) of AI Singapore PhD Fellow Project (of National Research Foundation, Singapore) (新加坡国家研究基金—国家人工智能计划博士研究员项目) (2022 to 2025): Resource-Efficient AI - “Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification, Self-Supervised/Unsupervised Person Re-Identification, Domain Generalized Person Re-Identification” (380,800 SGD) -
Participator of Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute Project (2022 to 2025) -
Participator of 1 National Key Research and Development Program of China, and 2 general programs of National Natural Science Foundation of China (2018 to 2021). -
Participator of the National Science and Technology Innovation Project (2018 to 2020). -
Participator of Shenzhen Sustainable Development of Science and Technology Project (2021).
The developed 4D Depth Video Based Gait Recognition & Emotion Prediction System and the Swarm Intelligence Computing and Multi-Sensor Based Sleep Monitoring System have been applied to various universities and hospitals with more than 20,000 clinical experiments, including: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning of Beijing Normal University, Peking University Sixth Hospital, the Second Xiangya Hospital, Shenzhen People’s Hospital, etc.
Awards & Honors
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IEEE TPAMI Featured Cover (Top 0.2% Worldwide) -
Rising Star Award (10 Recipients Worldwide) , The International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC), 2026 -
Aoxiang Overseas Scholar (10 Recipients in 2025) , Northwestern Polytechnical University -
AI Singapore (AISG) PhD Fellow (13 Awardees Worldwide in 2022) -
ESI Highly Cited Paper (Top 1% in Engineering Worldwide) -
Distinguished PC Member (Top 3% Worldwide) , IJCAI - Outstanding Reviewer, IJCAI
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IEEE Healthcom Best Paper Award (The only best paper) -
IEEE CloudCom Best Paper Runner-Up Award (Top 0.5%) -
Outstanding Contribution Award, European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness -
NTU Research Scholarship -
National Scholarship (Top 0.2% Nationwide) , Ministry of Education of China -
President Scholarship (Special Award, Top 3%) , Shenzhen Institudes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences -
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award , South China University of Technology (SCUT) -
2nd Place (Leader) in South China Hackathon of Microsoft -
1st Place (Leader) in Wenshi Software Design Contest of SCUT -
Outstanding Student Association (Leader) of SCUT SSE -
1st Prize (Leader) in Creative Programming Design Contest of SCUT SSE
Invited Talks
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Invited by School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University , China -
Invited by Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University , China -
Invited by School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University , China -
Invited by Joint SDU-NTU Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (C-FAIR) , China -
Invited by Artificial Intelligence Thrust, Information Hub, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) , China -
Invited by Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University, China -
Invited by chool of Software, Shandong University, China -
Invited by AI Singapore Committee (of Singapore National Research Foundation), NUS, Singapore -
Invited by International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness. -
Invited by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, China
Other Experiences
- Popular Science Lecture Speaker at Chengdu Shishi High School (“文翁石室”), a time-honored school with over 2,000 years of history.
- Director of Publicity Committee & Member of Academic Committee, NTU CCDS (SCSE) Graduate Student Club
- Director of Information & News Committee, SCUT SSE Student Union
- A former top billiard player, an excellent golf player on the green, a qualified 15km+ runner, and a never-boring singer.
- A Memorable Summer Voluntary Teaching in Yunfu Middle School (2016 - 2017)