UP Lab
Xiatian Zhu, a Reader (Associate Professor) affiliated with the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence and the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, leads the Universal Perception (UP) Lab. Previously a research scientist at Samsung AI Centre, Cambridge, UK, He holds a Ph.D. from the Queen Mary University of London. He serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) and Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). He also serves/served as an Area Chair of top conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, and ICLR. He is a member of EPSRC’s Peer Review College, and an IEEE Senior Member.
Physical Spacetime AI for a People-Centred World: The UP Lab is dedicated to advancing physical spacetime AI — building world models that perceive, generate, and reason about the physical world across space, time, and physical law. We model diverse data and observations, such as images, videos, audio, text, point cloud, LiDAR, radar, X-ray, hyperspectral images, and remote sensing, to capture not just how scenes appear but how they are structured in 3D, how they evolve over time, and how they behave according to physical principles. Our applications span a wide range of domains, such as creative media, fashion design, healthcare, climate science, finance, cybersecurity, chemical engineering, sports, gaming, and social issues. Guided by our principle of putting people at the heart of AI, we prioritise the ethical development and integration of AI capabilities with real-world application norms, emphasising sustainable and responsible AI innovation and practice. This ensures our AI initiatives are grounded in community needs and values, aiming to develop transformative technologies that positively impact society and enhance the wellbeing of people and communities.
News
| Jun 18, 2026 | 3 ECCV papers accepted |
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| May 18, 2026 | Awarded EuroHPC GPU access |
| May 13, 2026 | Awarded as ICML Silver Reviewer |
| May 7, 2026 | 1 ICML paper accepted |
| Mar 10, 2026 | Awarded GPU access of 10,000 hours to the AI Research Resource (AIRR) advanced supercomputers |
| Mar 9, 2026 | Serving for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) EPSRC’s Reer Review College |
| Mar 6, 2026 | Serving as Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) |
| Feb 23, 2026 | 3 CVPR and 2 CVPR Findings track papers accepted |
| Jan 26, 2026 | 3 ICLR papers accepted |
| Oct 16, 2025 | Welcome Mr. Xuanya Zhu joining us as a fresh PhD student |
| Sep 18, 2025 | 3 NeurIPS papers accepted |
| Sep 6, 2025 | Winners for both CBCT imagery segmentation and interactive segmentation tasks of the ToothFairy3 Challenge, MICCAI 2025. Team: Zhi Qin Tan, Xiatian Zhu, Owen Addison, Yunpeng Li |
| Sep 2, 2025 | Serving as Area Chair for The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026 |
| Aug 28, 2025 | Serving as Oral Session Chair for IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025 |
| Aug 16, 2025 | Serving as Area Chair for The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 |