Xi (Sunshine) Niu

Dr. Xi (Sunshine) Niu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), and Director of the CCI Honors Program. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Business Information Systems & Operations Management (BISOM) at the Belk College of Business. Her research focuses on Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Data and Text Mining, with recent projects including text mining for recommendation models, retrieval-enhanced multi-modal LLMs for medical QA, and domain-specific text/data mining.

• Education:
• Ph.D., Information Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2012)
• M.S., Software, Tsinghua University (2006)

Teaching includes ITIS/DSBA 6162 Data Mining and ITIS/DSBA 6188 Text Mining and Information Retrieval. She is passionate about data, text, language, and LLMs, and collaborates widely. Her NSF/industry-funded work emphasizes practical applications in healthcare and beyond.