Xinyu Mao

Xinyu Mao is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ielab in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. He completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Guido Zuccon, Dr. Bevan Koopman, Dr. Harissen Scells, and Dr. Teerapong Leenalupab. Prior to his PhD, Xinyu received a Master of Data Science from UQ in 2022.

Xinyu’s research focuses on domain-specific search, particularly the automation of medical systematic reviews, at the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). His research investigates how artificial intelligence can support effective and efficient human–AI collaboration in knowledge synthesis. His work includes developing semantic retrieval models that incorporate domain knowledge to prioritise relevant studies during systematic review screening, using Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict the effectiveness of Boolean search queries, and exploring AI-assisted methods that reduce human effort while maintaining the reliability and transparency required in evidence synthesis.

Xinyu has published at leading Information Retrieval venues, including SIGIR and ECIR, and has contributed open-source software such as DenseReviewer and AiReview to support systematic review screening. His work has been supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects programme.