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Image of Xia HuDr. Xia (Ben) Hu, a member of the Texas A& M Engineering Experiment Station’s (TEES) Center for Remote Health Technologies, has joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University as an assistant professor.

His research focuses on data mining and social computing, which is a hands-on field that requires him to work closely with industry professionals.

“Nowadays, data is everywhere,” Hu said. “It becomes large and complex. My research mainly focuses on how we can deal with this large-scale, networked, sparse and dynamic data.”

Along with directing the Data Analytics at Texas A&M (DATA) Lab, he works alongside an assortment of industries such as LinkedIn, IBM research centers, Yahoo! Labs and NEC Labs, and health care professionals.

“We try to mine interesting patterns from social media data to help the users to gain a better consumer experience,” he said. “My group is also working on health informatics to provide better solutions for patients to receive better healthcare and for medical doctors to make better decisions by mining historical data.”

Hu said that he also sees his research in data mining expanding to new areas such as environmental sciences.

Prior to joining the computer science and engineering faculty at Texas A&M, Hu worked as a postdoctoral researcher for Arizona State University and the Phoenix Veteran Affairs Health Care System. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science from Beihang University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University. He is also a member of the TEES Center for the Study of Digital Libraries.