> whoami

Mengzhu Xu 许梦竹 · a.k.a. Duke

Researcher × Engineer.

I make medical AI run in the real world.

Healthcare AI Edge Inference Biomedical Signals NLP Sleep × Circadian
Eindhoven, Netherlands
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About

I'm an AI engineer and PhD researcher with 7+ years of building deployable, production-grade ML systems — across healthcare, automotive, and enterprise applications.

My path started in marine electrical engineering in Shanghai, took a turn through a mechatronics exchange in Zeeland, and crystallized at TU/e where I found my home in biomedical signal processing. I followed that thread through fetal-ECG extraction, an MSc thesis on early prediction of necrotizing enterocolitis with Philips, and into industry — building clinical NLP, recommender systems, and on-vehicle conversational AI at Philips Research and NIO.

Now in PhD with Prof. J.-P. Linnartz at TU/e, I'm closing the loop: bringing real-time, low-latency AI to wearables for sleep and circadian-rhythm sensing — where my research and engineering halves finally meet.

FOCUS
Deployable AI for healthcare
BASED IN
Eindhoven, NL
LANGUAGES
English · Chinese · Dutch (basic)
AWARDS
Best Paper · Philips Top 3 / 200 · 5 patents

Journey

2023 — PRESENT
PhD, Electrical Engineering · TU/e
Biomedical Signal Processing on edge devices · Sleep & Circadian · Linnartz group
2024.06 — 2025.12
AI Solutions Consultant · Fusion Consulting
End-to-end AI systems for healthcare and compliance use cases
2022.03 — 2023.09
Senior NLP Algorithm Engineer · NIO Inc.
Cloud-to-edge NLP deployment for in-vehicle conversational AI
2019.12 — 2022.03
Intelligent Algorithm Scientist · Philips Research Asia
Clinical NLP, ViT-based medical imaging, recommender systems
2017 — 2019
MSc, Electrical Engineering (Signal Processing Systems) · TU/e
GPA 8.5/10 · Thesis 9/10: Early prediction of NEC in preterm infants (with Philips)
2013 — 2017
BSc, Electrical Engineering (Cum Laude) · Shanghai Maritime University
Exchange year in Mechatronics at HZ University of Applied Sciences, NL
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Selected Projects

Where research questions meet shipped systems.

RESEARCH · PHD 2024 — Now

Real-Time Circadian Phase Estimation on Wearables

Estimating circadian phase from PPG and actigraphy with low-latency inference, enabling closed-loop interventions on wrist-worn devices.

Lightweight, latency-aware architecture trained on multi-day wearable signals; deployable on-device.
PyTorch ONNX PPG / Actigraphy EMBC 2026
ENGINEERING · NIO 2022 — 2023

Cloud-to-Edge NLP for In-Vehicle Conversational AI

Compressed cloud-grade NLP models to run on automotive edge hardware under strict latency and memory budgets.

Operator-level optimization & ONNX acceleration; production pipelines for NER, text correction, semantic parsing. 3 patents filed (2 granted).
ONNX Runtime PyTorch Edge AI In-Vehicle
RESEARCH × ENG · PHILIPS 2020 — 2022

Clinical Terminology Standardization (Free-Text → ICD-10)

An embedding-based auto-encoder mapping physicians' free-text clinical concepts to ICD-10 codes, deployed as an API on the Philips clinical platform.

Top-5 precision: 73% → 94.5%. Best Paper, OCUPAI 2021 NLP track.
Embeddings Auto-Encoder REST API Docker
RESEARCH · TU/E 2023 — 2024

Light-Based Adjustment to Daylight Saving Transitions

Mathematical modeling of how office-lighting protocols can mitigate the circadian disruption caused by Daylight Saving Time shifts.

Validated lighting protocol. Published in Scientific Reports (2024) + IEEE LS24.
Circadian Modeling Python Smart Lighting
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Publications

Peer-reviewed work in biomedical AI, signal processing, and circadian science.

  1. 2026
    M. Xu, N. Cabrilo, M. van Gilst, J.-P. Linnartz
    Toward Real-Time Circadian Phase Estimation with Low Latency from Wearable Sensing Data
    IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2026
  2. 2025
    S. Lin, Z. Wang, H. van Gorp, M. Xu, M. van Gilst, S. Overeem, J.P. Linnartz
    SSC-SleepNet: A Siamese-Based Automatic Sleep Staging Model with Improved N1 Sleep Detection
    IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2025
  3. 2024
    M. Xu, C. Papatsimpa, M. van Gilst, J.P. Linnartz
    Modelling Office Lighting Optimization for Daylight Saving Time Transitions
    IEEE Sustainable Smart Lighting World Conference & Expo (LS24), 2024
  4. 2024
    M. Xu, C. Papatsimpa, L. Schlangen, J.P. Linnartz
    Improving adjustment to daylight saving time transitions with light
    Scientific Reports, vol. 14, article 15001, 2024
  5. 2021
    M. Xu, C. Tian, J. Ren
    Chinese Medical Concept Standardization from Free-text to ICD-10 by Embedding-based Auto-Encoder
    Philips Research Annual Conference OCUPAI 2021 · Best Paper, NLP Track
  6. 2020
    E. Fotiadou, M. Xu, B. van Erp, R.J.G. van Sloun, R. Vullings
    Deep convolutional long short-term memory network for fetal heart rate extraction
    IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2020
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Patents

5 patents filed across healthcare AI, in-vehicle systems, and LLM evaluation.

Data Mining Method for Regionalized Courses and Hospital Resource Allocation
Application No. 202110594734.7
US
Method and Software for Medical Terminology Standardization
Application No. 202110872803.6
EU
System for Checking NLU Modules Parsing Negative Prefix Claims in Dialogue Systems
Application No. NR20220900320
CN
Multimodal Pedal Mis-Touch Detection System for Automobiles
Application No. NR20221000268
CN
Method for Detecting Whether an LLM is Trained on Predefined Datasets
Publication No. CN117892100A
CN
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Get in touch

Open to research collaborations, consulting on healthcare-AI deployment, and senior algorithm-engineering roles. The fastest way to reach me is email.