Dr. Xiong's general area of research is data and knowledge engineering, with a focus on developing effective and efficient data analysis techniques for emerging data intensive applications. His research has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), IBM Research, SAP Corporation, Panasonic USA Inc., Awarepoint Corp., Citrix Systems Inc., and Rutgers University. He has published prolifically in refereed journals and conference proceedings, such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the VLDB Journal, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Machine Learning, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) , and ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). His book, titled "Encyclopedia of GIS", has been recognized as the Top 10 Most Popular Computer Science Book authored by Chinese Scholars at Springer.

Dr. Xiong currently serves as a co-Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia of GIS (Springer) and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering (TKDE), IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD) and ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS). He has served regularly on the organization and program committees of numerous conferences, including as a Program Co-Chair of the Industrial and Government Track for the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), a Program Co-Chair for the IEEE 2013 International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), a General Co-Chair for the IEEE 2015 International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), and a Program Co-Chair of the Research Track for the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2018) .