Bio

Xu Xu’s research applies artificial intelligence and computer vision to human motion data collected from video, wearable sensors, and motion capture, with applications in workplace safety and injury prevention.

The lab works across several method areas: human-robot collaboration, including reinforcement learning for co-robot behavior and studies of worker stress, trust, and cognitive workload; generative AI for human motion, using diffusion models and variational autoencoders to synthesize posture and muscle-activity data where real data is scarce; privacy-preserving machine learning, including federated learning that lets institutions train shared models without exchanging raw human-subject data; transfer learning for rare and previously unseen movements; markerless motion capture, estimating joint angles and spinal load from ordinary video; and vision-language models for automated ergonomic risk assessment.

These projects are supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and appear in Human Factors, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, Journal of Biomechanics, and Applied Ergonomics.

PhD graduates from the lab have gone on to research scientist and engineering roles at Meta, Amazon, ByteDance, Applied Materials, and BYD Auto, as well as postdoctoral and faculty positions. Students here develop end-to-end capability: designing and running studies with human participants, collecting motion and physiological data, training and evaluating models, and publishing in both human factors and machine learning venues.

Xu is recruiting PhD students. If you are interested in joining the lab, email a CV and a short note about what you’d like to work on.

Xu teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in human factors and ergonomics, including ISE 352 (Fundamentals of Human-Machine Systems Design), ISE 541 (Occupational Safety Engineering), ISE 544 (Occupational Biomechanics), and ISE 794 (Advanced Biomechanical Modeling). He received the Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award and the C. A. Anderson Outstanding Faculty Award.

Before joining NC State, Xu was a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Public Health at Harvard University and then a research scientist at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, where he received best-paper and outstanding scientific contribution awards.

Area(s) of Expertise

Xu Xu's research interests include human factors and ergonomics · occupational biomechanics and musculoskeletal injury prevention · computer vision and machine learning for human motion analysis · human-robot interaction and collaboration · generative models for synthetic human motion data