Prof Hoi is a researcher specialized in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence. His research interests include machine learning (especially deep learning and online learning) and their applications to real-world domains, including computer vision and pattern recognition, multimedia information retrieval, social media, web search and data mining, natural language processing, computational finance, etc . He has published over 250 high-quality referred journal and conference papers. He has contributed extensively in academic communities. He has served as the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of Neurocomputing, General Co-chair for ACM SIGMM Workshops on Social Media (WSM'09-11), Program Co-Chair for Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML'12), Book editor for "Social Media Modeling and Computing", Guest editor for Machine Learning and ACM TIST journals, Associate Editor (AE) for many reputable journals including IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. (TPAMI), Area Chair/Senior-PC/TPC for many conferences. He has been invited for external grant review by worldwide funding agencies, including USA NSF agency, Hong Kong RGC agency, etc.

Prof Hoi was the recipient of Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship Award for research excellence in 2018 and Lee Kong Chian Fellowship Award in 2016. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow (2019) for his significant contributions to machine learning for multimedia information retrieval and scalable data analytics, and named as ACM Distinguished Members (2019) for his outstanding contributions to the computing field. He was ranked among top 1% scientists (AI field) in the world according to a global study by Stanford Univeristy.