Welcome to The ALIEN Lab. We Build AI & Robotics for Life & Space. We are the world's first lab dedicated to defining Space AI. Life AI aims to improve health and longevity. Space AI empowers access to unlimited space and resources. Join us as a PhD student or RA to shape the future.

The ALIEN Lab

AI, Life, Interplanetary Exploration Nexus

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AI & Robotics
for Life

Advancing the health, longevity, and resilience of all life.

Medical Image Analysis
Medical Robotics
Human Genomics
Human Motion Analysis

AI & Robotics
for Space

Accessing boundless space, wealth, and resources.

Spacecraft Design & Control
Remote Sensing & Earth Observation
Autonomous Space Robotics
Astrobiology & Life Detection
Space AI

Projects

Machine Vision

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2017

Output 33 Conference and Journal papers.

Surgical AI

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2022

Output: 4 Conference and Journal papers.

Human Motion Analysis

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2017

Output: 3 Conference and Journal Papers

Remote Sensing

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: TBC

Medical Image Analysis

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2019

Output: 43 Conference and Journal Papers

Space AI

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: First Paper for Space AI in the World

Space Robotics

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: TBC

Multi AI Agent System

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: TBC

Healthcare Robot

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: 3 papers.

Low-Level Vision

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: 3 Papers.

Climate Forecasting

People: Ziyang Wang

Since: 2024

Output: 3 Journal Papers.

Teams

Ziyang Wang

Principal Investigator

Members

Minghan Lin

Incoming PhD

Liping Meng

Incoming PhD

Pengyu Zhang

Incoming PhD

Shaoyue Wang

Incoming PhD

Liyuan Sun

Incoming PhD

Shixiang Zhuang

Incoming PhD

Guanyi Du

Research Assistant

Saeed Moosivand

Research Assistant

Steven Wu

Research Assistant

Chengyi Zhang

Research Assistant

Mahnaz Mohammed Salih

Research Assistant

Alumni

Ziru Wang

Now at HFUT 🇨🇳

Liu Yang

Now at Noitom 🇨🇳

Zixuan Ni

Now at Part and Sum 🇺🇸

Chengkuan Zhao

Now at RIT 🇺🇸

Yufan Liu

Now at CMU 🇺🇸

Guan Du

Now at Xunlei 🇨🇳

Chen Yang

Now at NUS 🇸🇬

Tianze Li

Now at Imperial College London 🇬🇧

Mercy Su

Now at HKU 🇭🇰

Haodong Zhang

Now at UC Irvine 🇺🇸

Zihong Xu

Now at Peking Uni 🇨🇳

Jiabao Li

Now at AHPU 🇨🇳

Chao Ma

Now at XJU 🇨🇳

Zhihao Chen

Now at BUPT 🇨🇳

Yiwen Zhou

Now at Harvard 🇺🇸

News

Conference: IEEE ICRA 2026

[Last Author] “KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV.” IEEE ICRA, 2026.

Conference: IEEE ICASSP 2026

[First Author] “VMambaMorph: a Visual Mamba-based Framework with Cross-Scan Module for Deformable 3D Image Registration.” IEEE ICASSP, 2026.

[Corresponding-Author] “Query-Specific Context-Enhanced Representation Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning.” IEEE ICASSP, 2026.

[Corresponding-Author] “Conjugate Relation Modeling for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion.” IEEE ICASSP, 2026.

Role: PI
Project: MULTI3-UKB: Multi-Organ, Multi-Disease, Multi-Modal UK Biobank Analytics for Disease Risk Prediction, Risk Factor Profiling, and Survival Stratification
Funder: EPS Seed Corn Funding
Amount: GBP £15K
Period: 2026/01–2026/08

Conference: IEEE ISBI 2026

[First Author] “KAN-OSD: DINO-Based Encoder and KAN-Based Decoders with Dual Contrastive Learning for One-Shot Anatomical Landmark Detection.” IEEE ISBI, 2026.

[First Author] “Trustworthy Longitudinal Brain MRI Completion: A Deformation-Based Approach with KAN-Enhanced Diffusion Model.” IEEE ISBI, 2026.

Talk Title: AI & Robotics for Healthcare
Location: Sir Peter Rigby Digital Futures Institute, UK
Speaker: Ziyang Wang

Role: Editorial Board
Journal: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Role: Area Chair
Conference: IEEE ICME

Paper Title: Unified Multimodal Learning for Stroke Triage: Joint Detection, Scoring, and Segmentation of Acute Ischemic Stroke
Journal: npj Digital Medicine

Role: Editorial Board
Journal: Digital Health

Paper Title: Climate Temporal Temperature Prediction via an Interpretable Kolmogorov-Arnold Neural Network
Journal: IEEE TIM

Title: Resource‑ and Energy‑Aware Multi‑Robot Operations: Scheduling, Recharging, and Long‑Horizon Persistence
Journal: Frontiers – Frontiers in Radiology
Submission Deadline: 30 Apr 2026
Guest Editors: Ziyang Wang, Jay Wang, Zhuangzhuang Dai, Pian Yu, Qingbiao Li
More Info

Role: Editorial Board
Journal: Neurocomputing

Title: Time Series Forecasting and Soft Sensing for Climate Modeling and Applications
Journal: MDPI – Applied Sciences
Submission Deadline: 20 April 2026
Guest Editors: Ziyang Wang, Yifan Zhao, Yongxiang Lei
More Info

Title: Toward Real-World Deployment: Trends in Autonomous Field Robotics
Journal: MDPI – Machines
Submission Deadline: 30 April 2026
Guest Editors: Jay Wang, Ziyang Wang
More Info

Title: Sustainable, Safe, and Eco-Conscious AI for Medical Image Analysis
Journal: Frontiers – Frontiers in Radiology
Submission Deadline: 1 June 2026
Guest Editors: Ziyang Wang, Qianhui Men, Zeju Li, Fangyijie Wang
More Info

Role: PI
Project: Incorporating explainability and efficiency into the development of AI-enabled EEG systems
Funder: EPS Funding, Aston University, UK
Amount: GBP £90K
Period: 2025/08–2029/07

Role: Co-I
Project: Multimodal Machine Learning for Early Detection of Health and Behavioural Anomalies in Smart Care Environments
Funder: Lee Mount Care Home, UK
Amount: GBP £45K
Period: 2025/08–2029/07

Role: Reviewer
Journal: Engineering

Role: Editorial Review Board
Journal: International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

Paper Title: Triple-Residual Enhanced Convolution- and Transformer-Based Hybrid Encoder-Decoder Network for Medical Image Segmentation
Journal: Neurocomputing

Paper Title: S4RoboFormer: Scribble-Supervised Segmentation for Surgical Robots via Augmented Consistency Training
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics

Paper Title: Learning an Efficient Optimizer via Hybrid-Policy Sub Trajectory Balance
Conference: 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Paper Title: Tem2-KAN: Data-driven temporal temperature prediction via an improved Kolmogorov–Arnold network
Journal: ISA Transactions

Paper Title: Zig-RiR: Zigzag RWKV-in-RWKV for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
More Info

Title: Fractional and Fractal Methods in Biomedical Imaging and Time Series Learning
Journal: MDPI – Fractal and Fractional
Submission Deadline: 31 August 2026
Guest Editors: Ziyang Wang, Jiabao Li, Chengjun Wang
More Info

Title: Fostering Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging
Journal: Frontiers – Frontiers in Medicine
Submission Deadline: 20 December 2025
Guest Editors: Yanda Meng, Meng Wang, Ke Zou, Ziyang Wang
More Info

Title: Multimodal Learning for Visual Intelligence: From Emerging Techniques to Real-World Applications
Journal: Elsevier – Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
Submission Deadline: 30 November 2025
Guest Editors: Guanghui Yue, Weide Liu, Ziyang Wang, Hadi Amirpour, Zhedong Zheng, Wei Zhou
More Info

Talk Title: AI for Healthcare
Location: University of Exeter, UK
Speaker: Ziyang Wang

Talk Title: AI for Healthcare
Location: University College Dublin, Ireland
Speaker: Ziyang Wang

Fellowship
Awarded By: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Germany
More Info

Fellowship
Awarded By: Outstanding Young Scholar Society UK
More Info

Role: Reviewer
Journal: Nature Communications

Paper Title: Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation through Dense Combinations of Dense Pseudo-Labels
Awarded By: MICCAI Data Engineering in Medical Imaging (DEMI) 2023
More Info

Role: Secretary General
Society: Xi'an Jiaotong University United Kingdom Alumni Association

The ALIEN Lab

AI, Life, Interplanetary Exploration Nexus

AI & Robotics for Life

AI & Robotics for Space

Projects

Teams

Members

Alumni

News

📄 Paper 31 Jan 2026 — 1 paper accepted at IEEE ICRA 2026!

📄 Paper 17 Jan 2026 — 3 papers accepted at IEEE ICASSP 2026!

💷 Grant 15 Jan 2026 — PI, GBP £15K, EPS Seed Corn Funding

📄 Paper 12 Jan 2026 — 2 papers accepted at IEEE ISBI 2026!

🎤 Talk 17 Dec 2025 — We gave an invited talk in Sir Peter Rigby Digital Futures Institute

🤝 Service 11 Nov 2025 — Invited to Join Editorial Board for Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence

🤝 Service 19 Dec 2025 — Invited to serve as Area Chair for IEEE ICME

📄 Paper 4 Dec 2025 — Our paper accepted at npj Digital Medicine!

🤝 Service 19 Oct 2025 — Invited to Join Editorial Board for Digital Health

📄 Paper 27 Sep 2025 — Our paper accepted at IEEE TIM!

📝 CFP 20 Sep 2025 — Special Issue Call at Frontiers

🤝 Service 19 Sep 2025 — Invited to Join Editorial Board for Neurocomputing

📝 CFP 19 Sep 2025 — Special Issue Call at MDPI

📝 CFP 12 Sep 2025 — Special Issue Call at MDPI

📝 CFP 14 Aug 2025 — Special Issue Call at Frontiers

💷 Grant 30 Aug 2025 — PI, GBP £90K, EPS Studentship Funding

💷 Grant 20 Aug 2025 — Co-I, GBP £45K, Lee Mount Care Home

🤝 Service 8 Aug 2025 — Invited to serve as Reviewer for Engineering

🤝 Service 30 July 2025 — Invited to Join Editorial Board for Sage

📄 Paper 27 July 2025 — Our paper accepted at Neurocomputing!

📄 Paper 16 July 2025 — Our paper accepted at IEEE TMRB!

📄 Paper 13 July 2025 — Our paper accepted at ECAI 2025!

📄 Paper 10 July 2025 — Our paper accepted at ISA Transactions!

📄 Paper 16 May 2025 — Our paper accepted at IEEE TMI!

📝 CFP 30 June 2025 — Special Issue Call at MDPI

📝 CFP 20 June 2025 — Special Issue Call at Frontiers

📝 CFP 30 June 2025 — Special Issue Call at Elsevier

🎤 Talk 8 June 2025 — We gave an invited talk in Exeter

🎤 Talk 8 April 2025 — We gave an invited talk in Dublin

🏅 Award 20 Dec 2024 — Fellowship at DAAD!

🏅 Award 1 Dec 2024 — Fellowship at OYSS!

🤝 Service 1 July 2021 — Invited to serve as Reviewer for Nature Communications

🏅 Award 1 Oct 2023 — Best Paper Award at MICCAI DEMI!

🤝 Service 1 July 2021 — Invited to serve as Secretary General for XJUKAA

Let's Talk!

AI & Robotics
for Life

AI & Robotics
for Space