Dr. Xu is a researcher in the fields of multimedia, computer vision and machine learning. She has published over 200 research papers in prestigious international journals and conferences, including IEEE T-PAMI, IEEE T-NNLS, IEEE T-MM, IEEE T-MC, PR, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ACM MM, AAAI and so on. Since 2018, she has generated over $4 million in research income and successfully led many research projects funded by the Australian government and industry. She is an editorial board member for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Elsevier Journal of Neurocomputing, and Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanised Computing; and has served as a program chair/area chair for many major conferences.

She is one of the pioneers in the area of multimedia affective/semantic content analysis, multimedia multi-modality information analysis and fusion, and personalised multimedia services. Her recent research interests include developing machine learning algorithms for multimedia data analytics and computer vision applications. She is also very interested in CV and RF integrated sensing for smart home and healthcare related applications.