Prof. Xiaofan LIU 劉肖凡

• Engineer for blockchain developement. Candidates are required to have experiences with
  1. Blockchain development and
  2. EVM smart contract development.
• Research Assistant or Post-Doctorate Researcher for a Web3 research project. Candidates are required to have
  1. Knowledge and experience of the Web3 industry,
  2. Blockchain data analytics skills, and
  3. Media data analytics skills.
• Research Assistant for an anti-scam initiative. Candidates are required to be capable of
  1. using AIGC, e.g., ChatGPT, for data analytics,
  2. understanding and applying communication theories in promotion campaigns,
  3. having experience with web page editing and website management.
• To apply, please send your resume, a cover letter explaining your interest and qualifications for the position, and any relevant project samples or publications to me.

• Go to our award-winning anti-scam website: anti-scam.ccr.cityu.edu.hk.
• Our research explores the intersection of large language model (LLM) analytics, media studies, and psychological insights to better understand and combat online scams. By continuously scanning and analyzing social media posts, such as those found in Hong Kong–based forums, our platform helps shed light on scammers’ evolving methods and the psychological tactics they use to manipulate victims. Through this integrated approach, we aim to inform preventative strategies and empower users with knowledge to protect themselves online.
• Our project “Pioneering Technology, Linking the World: Big Data and AI’s New Role in Scam Prevention” was recognised as one of thirteen Outstanding Cases of Jointly Building a Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace by the World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit 2024. News by CGTN
• Liu, X. F., Ai, Y., Jiang, L. C., Wang, X., & Wu, Y. (2024). Understanding the human element in scams: a multidisciplinary approach. Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228053.2024.2439192
• Zhou, S., Liu, X. F., Nah, F. F.-H., Harrison, S., Zhang, X., Zhen, S., Yeung, D., Hsiao, J., LC, R., Chan, A., Wang, X., Jiang, C., Lin, F., Li, J., Wong, A., Chan, L., George, B., & Li, P. (2024). Understanding and Fighting Scams: Media, Language, Appeals and Effects. In HCII 2024 - Late Breaking Papers (LNCS). Springer.
• We thank China Unicom Global Ltd. for their support in our anti-scamming initiative.

• Cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin), tokens issued on blockchain systems (e.g., USDT), and their derivative applications (e.g., De-Fi, Game-Fi, and NFT), are the frontier of financial technology (FinTech). This frontier is also known as the Web3 industry. Our team does four lines of research in this area:
  1. Cryptocurrency Transaction Analysis from a Network Perspective. All cryptocurrencies' transactions are publicly recorded in blockchains. We analyze blockchain data to unfold a panorama of human behaviors.
  2. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations is a new way of online collaboration, where members make collaborative decisions with online deliberation and token-based voting. We analyze their social and transactional behavior to understand how humans may collaborate in the future.
  3. How are the world getting ready for Web3? We are composing an index to measure the preparedness of cities and regions over the globe on this matter.
  4. Cryptocurrencies, Web3 as well, may not be tamable by the current regulatory frameworks after all. However, rebuilding the conventional financial system with Web3-proven technologies might be possible. So, why not?
• We thank the RGC (and more importantly all the reviewers) for the support to our research project Balancing DAO Governance: The Interplay of Organizational Structure, Decision-making, and Sustainability and the ITC for the other things.

Selected papers (* corresponding author)

• Fan, J., Ai, Y., Liu, X. F.* (2024). DAO’s Governance Paradox: Balancing Organizational Structures for Business and Communal Goals. The 74st Annual International Communication Association Conference (ICA2024), June 2024. (Top Paper Award and Top Student Paper Award by the Organizational Communication Division at ICA 2024.)
• Liu, K., Yu, M., Jin, Y., Wang, Y., Yan, J., & Liu, X. F.* (2023). Tokenomic Model of Friend.Tech Social Platform: A Data-driven Analysis. In Proceedings - 23rd IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW 2023), December 2023.
• Liu, X. F., Jiang, X.-J., Liu, S.-H., & Tse, C. K. (2021). Knowledge Discovery in Cryptocurrency Transactions: A Survey. IEEE Access, 9, 37229-37254. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3062652
• Liu, X. F., & Ren, H.-H. (2021). Characterizing key agents in the cryptocurrency economy through blockchain transaction analysis. EPJ Data Science, 10, 21. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00276-9
• Jiang, X.-J., & Liu, X. F.* (2021). CryptoKitties transaction network analysis: The rise and fall of the first blockchain game mania. Frontiers in Physics, 9, 631665. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2021.631665

Media coverage

• The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game, IEEE Spectrum, August 2022.
  
• Top Blockchain University: City University of Hong Kong, CoinDesk, November 2021.

Random thoughts

• 迷雾中探索新世界：Web3概念的社会建构, posted on 信报, 28 Nov, 2024.
• To Survive, a Blockchain Game must be a Game First, posted on South China Morning Post, 1 Sep, 2021.
• 为什么说央行数字货币是区块链的噩梦, 巴比特, 2020年4月27日.
• 还“数”于民：西方的 Web 改革浪潮及其与东方创新的潜在融合，第18届全国互联网与音视频广播发展研讨会 (NWC 2019)，嘉兴，2019年4月26日.
• 借天领地：广播网络能否破解区块链的“三元悖论”？，首届中国区块链技术大会，杭州，2018年11月25日. （以及我们的回答）

• Our research group is actively exploring various applications of recent AIGC technologies, such as large language models, diffusion models, and agentic frameworks, to advance social science research and address practical issues.
  
• We express our gratitude to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support of our project, "AI for Farmers: A Speech Dialog App for Pesticide Safe Use," with their Catalyzing Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use Grand Challenges initiatives.

• The dark web are web services running on the darknet, which is a set of computer servers connected by and can only be accessed from encrypted networks. A common impression associated with the dark web is drug trading. But there is much more going on in that corner of the Internet. The dark web can also be considered an anonymous communication channel from the perspective of communication theory, underpinning human communication in an extremely covert environment.
• Our lab is curating an archive for dark websites. Until September 2022, we identified more than five million URLs from over 50 thousand dark web domains. The total volume of data downloaded exceeded 5 TB.

Selected papers (* corresponding author)

• Chen, Z., Jardine, E., Liu, X. F.*, & Zhu, J. J. H. (2022). Seeking Anonymity on the Internet: The Knowledge Accumulation Process and Global Usage of the Tor Network. New Media & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211072201.
• Pu, J. Y., & Liu, X. F.* (2022). To Defend Rights Online: The Roles of Internet Self-efficacy and Privacy Concern in Online Rights-defending Participation. The virtual 72st Annual International Communication Association Conference (ICA2022), May 2022.
• Chen Z. & Liu X. F.* (2021). Why Do Users Leave Anonymous Online Communities? An Exploratory Study of the Silk Road Forum on the Dark Web. The virtual 71st Annual International Communication Association Conference (ICA2021), 27-31 May 2021.

• Modern humans spend about four hours per day on their smartphones. During lockdowns? The time can increase by up to another two hours. Our analyses of more than five million Chinese smartphone users affected by lockdowns in 2021 (filtered out from several hundred million users) show that the increased hours are prioritized according to the psychological need pyramid: physiological (e.g., food), entertainment, and social needs first, and self-actualization only later. On the contrary, both online and offline commercial activities are suppressed due to halted logistics. The suppressed desire for large merchandise (e.g., cars) purchasing is especially worrisome for the economy.
• Shanghai has endured an exceptionally long lockdown in the first half of 2022. Many humanitarian disasters during this time and their potential psychological hazards have been predicted by our data (or should we say lived through by people from other cities). We hope that whoever reads our study can help disseminate the message to policymakers and the public, hoping to avoid repeating yesterday anymore.

Selected studies (* corresponding author)

• Liu, X. F., Wang, Z.-Z., Xu, X.-K., Wu, Y., Zhao, Z., Deng, H., Wang, P., Chao, N., & Huang, Y.-H. (2023). The shock, the coping, the resilience: Smartphone application use reveals COVID-19 lockdown effects on human behaviors. EPJ Data Science. 12, 17. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00391-9
• Fan, J., Chen, Y. M., Zhang, L., Wu, Y., & Liu, X. F.* (2023). Attraction behind “Beauty”: Revealing Gay Men’s Self-Presentation on a Dating App with Computer Vision. Computational Communication Research, 5(1), 51. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2023.1.002.JIAM
• Zhu, J. J. H., Chen, H., Peng, T. Q., Liu, X. F., & Dai, H. (2018). How to measure sessions of mobile phone use? Quantification, evaluation, and applications. Mobile Media & Communication, 6(2), 215-232. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157917748351

• Teamed with Prof. XU Xiao-Ke (Dalian Minzu University) and Prof. WU Ye (Beijing Normal University), we hand-coded daily COVID-19 case reports from Chinese local health commissions, from the first days of the pandemic, and extracted useful epidemiological information. We released the dataset on GitHub and figshare. The dataset has supported numerous publications in top-tier venues, including Science, Clinical Infectious Disease, and Emerging Infectious Disease. The Paper (澎湃) press also made a fabulous data visualization based on our data and won a major China data journalism award in 2021. Read our blog post for the story behind this massive dataset (and on the unreadiness of artificial intelligence in fighting COVID-19, as least in its early stages).
• We acknowledge the funding support from The International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) and the Grand Challenges (GC) initiative in their GC ICODA COVID-19 Data Science pilot initiative. Follow the progress of this project on The Global Health Network.

Selected papers (* corresponding author, + equally contributed)

• Wang, Z.+, Liu, X. F.+, Du, Z.+, Wang, L.+, Wu, Y., Holme, Lachmann, M., Lin, H., P., Wong, Z. S. Y., Xu, X.-K. & Sun, Y. (2022) Epidemiologic Information Discovery from Open-Access COVID-19 Case Reports Via Pretrained Language Model. iScience, 25(10), 105079. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105079
• Liu, X. F., Xu, X. K., & Wu, Y. (2021). Mobility, exposure, and epidemiological timelines of COVID-19 infections in China outside Hubei province. Scientific Data, 8, 54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00844-8
• Xu, X-K.+, Liu, X. F.+, Wu, Y.+, Ali, S. T.+, Du, Z.+, Bosetti, P., Lau, E. H. Y., Cowling, B. J., & Wang, L.* (2020). Reconstruction of Transmission Pairs for novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in mainland China: Estimation of Super-spreading Events, Serial Interval, and Hazard of Infection. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71(12), 3163-3167. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa790
• 刘肖凡, 吴晔, & 许小可 (2020). 媒体在流行病暴发事件中的干预作用: 基于传染病模型理论和新型冠状病毒疫情案例的分析. 全球传媒学刊, 7(1), 169-185. https://doi.org/10.16602/j.gmj.20200011
• 数字的游戏：辣评预测2020新型冠状病毒nCov传播规模的几项研究，2020年1月31日.

Monograph

• 刘肖凡, & 谢智刚. (2015). 知诸网: 网络科学及其在艺术、金融和社会学中的应用. 科学出版社, 北京.

Full Publication List

• Web of Science
• Scopus
• Google Scholar
• CityU Scholar
• ORCID

Patents

• Liu, X. F., Fu, Z., Yan, J., "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CLASSIFYING A CRYPTOCURRENCY ASSET", US Patent, Filed, No. 18/772,118; Hong Kong Short-Term Patent, Granted, No. HK30107829.
• 刘肖凡、李正龙，“群组间消息传播路径挖掘方法与系统”，中国发明，专利号 ZL 2017 1 01154048.7
• 刘肖凡、李正龙，“一种基于在线社交平台群聊数据对群成员进行关联的系统及方法”，中国发明，专利号 ZL 2016 1 0482435.3
• 庆光蔚、王会方、丁树庆、冯月贵、刘肖凡、高逸夫、胡静波、冯文龙、韩郡业、张军、米涌、王建华、梁秉、方铭杰，“一种基于最小加权时间距离的电梯救援站点最优选址方法”，中国发明，专利号 ZL 2017 1 0236990.2 （国家市场监管总局2020年度市场监管科研成果二等奖）
• 蔡成委、韦志群、刘肖凡，“一种基于用户画像动态轨迹模型的广告推荐方法及系统”，中国发明，公开号 CN108665083A，公开日2018年10月16日。

• COM3203 - Digital and Data Journalism for Bachelor students
• COM5507 - Social Media Data Acquisition and Processing for MA students
• COM5508 - Media Data Analytics for MACNM students
• COM8010 - Computational Social Science Methods for research students

• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
• Associate Editor, Frontiers in Blockchain
• Guest Editor, IET Blockchain
• Guest Editor, Frontiers in Physics
• Guest Editor, Mathematics