Rate My Professor Yonghuai Liu

Professor Yonghuai Liu is Professor of Computer Games & Graphics in the Department of Computer Science at Edge Hill University, where he has served as a full professor since 2018 and directs the Intelligent Visual Computing Research Centre. He is also a member of the Health Research Institute. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University from 2001 to 2018. Liu holds two doctoral degrees: a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern Polytechnical University, awarded in 1997 with the thesis 'Theoretical Investigation of Uncertain Reasoning Based on Norms,' and a PhD in Pattern Recognition from the University of Hull, awarded in 2001 with the thesis 'Developing Rigid Motion Constraints for the Registration of Free-form Shapes.' His research focuses on 3D computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and intelligent systems. These interests apply to areas such as facial expression recognition, anatomically consistent vasculature parsing, brain heterogeneity analysis for Alzheimer’s disease subtypes, microvascular reconstruction in retinal OCT angiography, and early dementia detection using retinal OCTA images.

Liu has published more than 170 papers in leading international journals and conferences, along with three books. Key recent works include 'MHAN: Multi-head hybrid attention network for facial expression recognition' (Pattern Recognition, 2026), 'Multi-Granularity Topological Reasoning for Anatomically Consistent Vasculature Parsing' (IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2026), 'Unsupervised Disentanglement of Brain Heterogeneity for Identifying Subtypes of Alzheimer’s Disease' (IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2026), '3D Microvascular Reconstruction in Retinal OCT Angiography Images via Domain-Adaptive Learning' (Pattern Recognition, 2025), and 'Beyond the Eye: A Relational Model for Early Dementia Detection Using Retinal OCTA Images' (Medical Image Analysis, 2025). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition Letters, associate editor for Neurocomputing, and editorial board member for other journals including American Journal of Educational Research. Liu has chaired the 36th British Machine Vision Conference (2025) and the Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (2025). His contributions have earned him the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar award in 2023, ranking him among the top 100 AI visualisation researchers worldwide, the Best Associate Editor Award for ICRA Proceedings in 2017, Outstanding Reviewer in 2022, and Top Reviewer in 2023.