Before that, he was a Research Officer of the National Research Council Canada. His research interests include machine learning, natural language processing, social media analysis, and medical informatics. Xiaodan received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Toronto in 2010 and his M.Eng. from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University in 2000. Xiaodan has worked with industrial research labs such as IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Google Research, Intel Research, and Microsoft Research Asia, as a research intern, visiting scholar, or a full-time researcher.