About Me

Hello! My name is Haotian Xia (夏浩天). I am a first-year PhD student in Computer Science at Rice University, advised by Prof. Hanjie Chen in the Chili Lab. My research interests focus on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), specifically grounding and reasoning, as well as sports analytics in multimodal large language models. I earned my master’s degree in Statistics at the University of California, Irvine, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Weining Shen. Prior to UCI, I completed my bachelor’s degree with Distinction in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was advised by Prof. Yuan-Fang Wang and Prof. Linda Petzold.

I enjoy sports. I started playing volleyball at the age of seven and later competed as an NCAA Division I student-athlete on the UCSB Men’s Volleyball Team with an athletic scholarship. I am also recognized as a National Level Athlete (国家一级运动员) in China.

If you’d like to discuss sports analytics research, feel free to email me.