Our Team

Biography

Prof. Yu Xiong is the Associate Vice-President for External Engagement at the University of Surrey. Previously, he served as the Associate Dean International from 2020 to 2022. Professor Xiong is the founding director of the Surrey Centre for Innovation and Commercialization, where he has secured approximately £2 million to support various activities within the university ecosystem. He is also the founding director of the Surrey Academy for Blockchain and Metaverse Applications, where he has obtained an additional £2 million in funding to support the university's education, training, and research in blockchain business applications. Professor Yu Xiong holds the Chair of Business Analytics at the Surrey Business School and is an academic member of the Department of Business Transformation. 

Before joining Surrey, he held positions at the University of York as an EPSRC Research Fellow, Queen's University Belfast as a Lecturer and Director of the China Management Research Institute, the University of East Anglia as an Associate Professor and Associate Director of External Engagement for Norwich Business School, and at Northumbria University as a Professor and Director of Enterprise Engagement, Faculty Lead for Knowledge Exchange, and Head of the Supply Chain Management Group. He is the Chair of the Advisory Board of the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Metaverse and Web 3.0, and a Board member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain.

Professor Xiong's research focuses on sustainable and technological issues within global supply chains, and he has published in leading international journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Nature Communications, International Journal of Operations and Production Management(IJOPM), International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Production Economics, the Journal of the Operational Research Society etc., among others. He has served as a guest editor for the International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Technovation, IEEE Transaction Part E etc.. According to Elsevier, from 2014-2023, he ranks third in the UK for his research outputs in Closed-Loop Supply Chain and Remanufacturing, and he is the number 1 cited researcher in the UK in the same category. One of his publications in Nature Communications has achieved an Altmetrics score of almost 1,960, placing it among the one of the forty most significant scientific achievements in 2021 and including it in the Timeline of Computing for that year. 

Professor Xiong's research has received funding from prominent organizations, including the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), Research England, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, the British Academy, the British Council, the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, the Satellite Applications Catapult, and many more private and public organizations. He was a Fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership(CISL, 2016-2023) , Senior Fellow of the University of Oxford Technology  and Management Centre for Development(TCMD, 2023-Present), Visiting Professor in Computer Science at the University of York, as well as a visiting professor at Durham University Business School.

In terms of innovation commercialization, Professor Xiong has extensive experience working as a director and chair of companies. While in Newcastle, he facilitated an £8 million investment to establish TusPark Newcastle, which has created a significant impact on ecosystem innovation in the North of England. He is a Strategic Advisor to the Satellite Application Catapult, appointed by the CEO, and recently became the managing director/co-founder of OxValue.ai(Winner of Falling Wall Scientific Breaking Through Awards, 2022), a joint venture with the University of Oxford, focusing on early-stage technology valuation. Professor Xiong has contributed to the growth of more than 40 companies in the UK, he is also the core team member of Fotor, one of the leading Generative AI platforms in the world, that has 650 million users.  In 2023, he co-founded Keath.ai, and became Chair of the board, this company won runner up award the the Times Higher Education Digital University Awards, as well as becoming the second prize of the influential Pie News Awards innovation of the year 2024.  Recently,  Professor Yu Xiong has been appointed as Senior Vice President for Research of Datasection Inc., a publicly listed company based in Tokyo. Datasection specializes in AI infrastructure and has a market capitalization of $150 million. The company is a key player in the AI industry, recently signing a significant agreement with Solaria to build a data center in Spain. This collaboration highlights Datasection's commitment to expanding its global presence and advancing AI-driven technologies in data infrastructure.

In the sustainability domain, Professor Xiong has dedicated much of his time to developing real-world projects. He was a company director for the ADAPT Group, running a £50 million Low Carbon Innovation Fund. He has also worked on various projects with UNESCO related to the Sustainable Development Goals, was a board director of 99P Recycling Limited, and served as a trustee for the charity Magna Carta World Peace and Sustainability Foundation. In 2018, he was appointed as Director and Chair of the London Fashion Fund, which is fully funded by the Mayor's Office of London to support sustainable fashion startups. His research was highlighted by the BBC as one of the 26 UK projects celebrating COP26 in 2021. His another research, collaborating with Therme Group, was asked to announce at COP 28. 

In the blockchain sphere, Professor Xiong is the Chair of the advisory board of the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Metaverse and Web 3.0, and Foundation Fellow to Endless Protocol(endless.link). He is also a lead member of the Maxity project, supporting charity fundraising through NFTs. According to Altmetrics, his research about blockchain, which was published in National Communication , is currently ranked as the world's number one for impact among academic publications featuring the keyword "blockchain."  He is now Principal Investigator to the influential research about tourism tokenomic model, funded by the largest tourism resort company in the world, Therme Group.  

Prof. Xiong's accomplishments extend beyond his professional achievements; in 2012, he was honored to be a London Olympic Torchbearer. In 2015, he received the distinguished May 4th Medal, also also received the 2021 Global Ghandi Award in House of Lords of the UK Parliament. 

See profile

Biography

See profile

Biography

Prof. Yu Xiong is the Associate Vice-President for External Engagement at the University of Surrey. Previously, he served as the Associate Dean International from 2020 to 2022. Professor Xiong is the founding director of the Surrey Centre for Innovation and Commercialization, where he has secured approximately £2 million to support various activities within the university ecosystem. He is also the founding director of the Surrey Academy for Blockchain and Metaverse Applications, where he has obtained an additional £2 million in funding to support the university's education, training, and research in blockchain business applications. Professor Yu Xiong holds the Chair of Business Analytics at the Surrey Business School and is an academic member of the Department of Business Transformation. 

Before joining Surrey, he held positions at the University of York as an EPSRC Research Fellow, Queen's University Belfast as a Lecturer and Director of the China Management Research Institute, the University of East Anglia as an Associate Professor and Associate Director of External Engagement for Norwich Business School, and at Northumbria University as a Professor and Director of Enterprise Engagement, Faculty Lead for Knowledge Exchange, and Head of the Supply Chain Management Group. He is the Chair of the Advisory Board of the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Metaverse and Web 3.0, and a Board member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain.

Professor Xiong's research focuses on sustainable and technological issues within global supply chains, and he has published in leading international journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Nature Communications, International Journal of Operations and Production Management(IJOPM), International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Production Economics, the Journal of the Operational Research Society etc., among others. He has served as a guest editor for the International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Technovation, IEEE Transaction Part E etc.. According to Elsevier, from 2014-2023, he ranks third in the UK for his research outputs in Closed-Loop Supply Chain and Remanufacturing, and he is the number 1 cited researcher in the UK in the same category. One of his publications in Nature Communications has achieved an Altmetrics score of almost 1,960, placing it among the one of the forty most significant scientific achievements in 2021 and including it in the Timeline of Computing for that year. 

Professor Xiong's research has received funding from prominent organizations, including the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), Research England, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, the British Academy, the British Council, the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, the Satellite Applications Catapult, and many more private and public organizations. He was a Fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership(CISL, 2016-2023) , Senior Fellow of the University of Oxford Technology  and Management Centre for Development(TCMD, 2023-Present), Visiting Professor in Computer Science at the University of York, as well as a visiting professor at Durham University Business School.

In terms of innovation commercialization, Professor Xiong has extensive experience working as a director and chair of companies. While in Newcastle, he facilitated an £8 million investment to establish TusPark Newcastle, which has created a significant impact on ecosystem innovation in the North of England. He is a Strategic Advisor to the Satellite Application Catapult, appointed by the CEO, and recently became the managing director/co-founder of OxValue.ai(Winner of Falling Wall Scientific Breaking Through Awards, 2022), a joint venture with the University of Oxford, focusing on early-stage technology valuation. Professor Xiong has contributed to the growth of more than 40 companies in the UK, he is also the core team member of Fotor, one of the leading Generative AI platforms in the world, that has 650 million users.  In 2023, he co-founded Keath.ai, and became Chair of the board, this company won runner up award the the Times Higher Education Digital University Awards, as well as becoming the second prize of the influential Pie News Awards innovation of the year 2024.  Recently,  Professor Yu Xiong has been appointed as Senior Vice President for Research of Datasection Inc., a publicly listed company based in Tokyo. Datasection specializes in AI infrastructure and has a market capitalization of $150 million. The company is a key player in the AI industry, recently signing a significant agreement with Solaria to build a data center in Spain. This collaboration highlights Datasection's commitment to expanding its global presence and advancing AI-driven technologies in data infrastructure.

In the sustainability domain, Professor Xiong has dedicated much of his time to developing real-world projects. He was a company director for the ADAPT Group, running a £50 million Low Carbon Innovation Fund. He has also worked on various projects with UNESCO related to the Sustainable Development Goals, was a board director of 99P Recycling Limited, and served as a trustee for the charity Magna Carta World Peace and Sustainability Foundation. In 2018, he was appointed as Director and Chair of the London Fashion Fund, which is fully funded by the Mayor's Office of London to support sustainable fashion startups. His research was highlighted by the BBC as one of the 26 UK projects celebrating COP26 in 2021. His another research, collaborating with Therme Group, was asked to announce at COP 28. 

In the blockchain sphere, Professor Xiong is the Chair of the advisory board of the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Metaverse and Web 3.0, and Foundation Fellow to Endless Protocol(endless.link). He is also a lead member of the Maxity project, supporting charity fundraising through NFTs. According to Altmetrics, his research about blockchain, which was published in National Communication , is currently ranked as the world's number one for impact among academic publications featuring the keyword "blockchain."  He is now Principal Investigator to the influential research about tourism tokenomic model, funded by the largest tourism resort company in the world, Therme Group.  

Prof. Xiong's accomplishments extend beyond his professional achievements; in 2012, he was honored to be a London Olympic Torchbearer. In 2015, he received the distinguished May 4th Medal, also also received the 2021 Global Ghandi Award in House of Lords of the UK Parliament. 

See profile

Biography

I have been a Research Assistant in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University (1973--75), SERC Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (1975-77), Royal Society European Research Fellow, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommuninations, Paris (1977--78), IBM Research Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford (1978--80), Principal Research Associate, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1980--84) and Principal Scientific Officer, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1985).

I also worked as the SERC Coordinator for Pattern Analysis (1982), and was Rutherford Research Fellow in Oxford University, Dept. Engineering Science (1985).

I joined the Department of Electrical Engineering of Surrey University in 1986 as a Reader in Information Technology, and became Professor of Machine Intelligence in 1991 and gained the title Distinguished Professor in 2004.

See profile

Biography

In July 2024, Professor Steve Wood concluded a five-year term as Dean of Surrey Business School where he led significant improvement in teaching, research, and staff engagement metrics as well as driving performance in wider international rankings. Steve has wide-ranging experience of academic leadership, including AACSB and AMBA accreditation, Research Excellence Framework (REF) submission and developing business school strategy. He was previously Director of Research, School REF lead, as well as Head of the Department of Marketing. Earlier in his academic career, Steve was Reader in Strategy, University of Southampton (2011-2012), and Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at University of Surrey (2005-2011). Prior to 2005, Steve spent three years at Tesco plc in its marketing and property departments advising on UK and international store development strategy and has experience as a Retail Analyst for Verdict Research, a London-based retail consultancy.

Steve's research particularly focuses on retailing, including internationalization, online retailing (and product returns), store location planning, competition policy, supply networks and pricing. He is European and Africa Regional Editor for the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, a member of the editorial board of Journal of Business Research and has been cited by the press in publications such as The Economist, China Daily and Retail Week. He has been a member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Peer Review College since 2015. In 2019 he was Visiting Professor at Global Production Networks Centre at the National University of Singapore. Steve has received research funding from the John Lewis Partnership, SONY, Advanced Institute of Management (AIM), British Academy of Management (BAM), NEMODE/EPSRC and the Nuffield Foundation. An experienced examiner, he was most recently external examiner for undergraduate management programmes at University of Bristol (2017-2022), having fulfilled the same role at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford (2011-2014) amongst others.

Since 2018, Steve has been a Trustee of Bohunt Education Trust, which comprises nine secondary schools and over 11,000 students, where he Chairs the Trust’s Education Committee. Earlier, between 2012-15, he sat on the governing body of Ash Manor School where he was Chair of its Curriculum Committee. He is a leader at his local village Cub Scout pack in Hampshire and Assistant Manager of the mighty Under 15s Liphook Pumas football team. 

See profile

Biography

John Collomosse is a Professor of Computer Vision and AI at the University of Surrey where he is the founder and director of DECaDE, the UKRI Research Centre for the Decentralized Digital Economy. Signal Processing (CVSSP).  He is a Fellow of the IET, a Chartered Engineer and Senior Member of IEEE. From 2018-2024 he was on the UKRI/EPSRC advisory team for Information & Communication Technologies (ICT).

He is concurrently a Principal Scientist and distinguished inventor at Adobe Research, where he manages the cross-modal representation learning (XRL) research group. He leads research for Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and is a core technical advisor to the initiative since his involvement in its inception in 2019. Now with 3500+ members, CAI leads a cross-industry standards group (C2PA; Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) where John chairs the cross-industry task forces on watermarking, and distributed ledgers (Blockchain) and previously also chaired a task force on fingerprinting.

John’s research intersects Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), with focus on media provenance to fight misinformation and online harms, and on improving data integrity and attribution for responsible AI. John’s content fingerprinting research is used to protect millions of images daily across Adobe’s platforms such as Photoshop, Lightroom and generative AI Firefly tools. John has also pioneered several visual search technologies, such as style, sketch and pose based search. These technologies have been shipped in products such as Behance.net.  Notably, he led the ARCHANGEL project which pioneered use of AI and Blockchain to tamper-proof National Archives around the world and was called out as a highlight of the 10 year UK Science Council (EPSRC) Digital Economy research programme.  John has presented to various government bodies on provenance, authenticity and AI opt out including the European Commission, UK House of Lords and APPG Blockchain.  

John’s early research developed some of the first computer vision based technologies to create the kind of non-photorealistic (artistic) filtering effects now commonly found in products like Photoshop, and was featured in the BBC, New Scientist among others. John has also spent previous periods of time in industry R&D elsewhere, including at Vodafone Munich and IBM Research Hursley. 

See profile