Qiang Yang qyang (at) cse (dot) ust (dot) hk Phone: (00852) 2358-8768 Fax: (00852) 2358-1477 Address: Department of Computer Science and Engineering Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong Room 3563 (Lift 27/28)

ACM SIGKDD 2012, Beijing, China

ACM TIST

Online Publication List  (Google Scholar Profile) | Transfer Learning Survey, Software and Data Resources | MIT Technology Review Article (ViCAD System)
Articles: Automatic Knowledge Discovery (in Chinese, from `10,000 Scientific Challenges'; 《10000个科学难题——信息科学卷>>，Science Press)
Mobile Social Networks and Social Media (in Huawei's Win Win Magazine) | Collaborative Location and Activity Recommendations with GPS History Data, in WWW 2010
2011 Talk: Transfer Learning in Social Recommendations | IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue: Transfer Learning in Social Networks

Research Interests:

• Data Mining: Transfer Learning, Social Media and Web Mining, Mobile Data Mining.
• Artificial Intelligence: Automated Planning, Machine Learning, Activity Recognition, and Case-based Reasoning

Positions and Education:

Professor (2007 - ) and Associate Head (PG and Research) at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST (2011 - )

B.Sc. (1982) Astrophysics at Peking University, Beijing, China (Alumnus of the CUSPEA program in 1982)
M.Sc. (1985) Astrophysics, University of Maryland, USA
M.Sc. (1987) Computer Science, University of Maryland, USA
PhD (1989) Computer Science, University of Maryland, USA
IEEE Fellow: for contributions to understanding and application of intelligent planning, learning and data mining.
ACM Distinguished Scientist (2011 - ) (Link to ACM)

Professor at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2001 - 2004)
Associate Professor and NSERC Industry Research Chair at Simon Fraser University, Canada (1995 - 2001)
Assistant/Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada (1989-1995)
Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research China (1999 to 2000) and University of Washington, USA (2000)
Founding Co-Director of RMBI Program at HKUST (2007-2011)
Postgraduate Director at HKUST (2007-2009, 2011 Summer)
Hong Kong RGC Engineering Panel member (2009 - 2011)

Laboratory Affiliations: AI and Databases

Honors:

• ACM CIKM-2011 Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award: Ou Jin, Nathan Nan Liu, Yong Yu and Qiang Yang. Transferring Topical Knowledge from Auxiliary Long Text for Short Text Understanding. Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (ACM CIKM 2011). Glasgow, UK. Oct 2011.
• Third place in the rating prediction of ACM KDDCUP 2011, Yahoo! Music Recommendation Challenge (Team Coach of Inner Peace team) (more info)
• Champion (Team Coach) of the 2005 ACM KDDCUP Competition on all three performance metrics. See related news item at the university and at KDnuggets. (Also see: our system demonstration: http://q2c.cs.ust.hk/q2c/)
• Co-Champion for the System ARMS (with Kangheng Wu and Yunfei Jiang) for learning planning models
  First International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS 2005, Monterey, CA, USA
• Champion (Team Coach, Tied for #1 Overall) of the 2004 ACM KDDCUP Competition
• Co-winner of the 1996 Automated Software Engineering Conference best paper award
• Co-winner of the 1994 Canadian AI Conference, best paper award

Current Professional Activities:

• General Chair, ACM KDD 2012, Beijing, China, Aug 12-16, 2012.
• General Co-Chair, ACML 2011, Third Asian Conference on Machine Learning, Nov. 13-15, 2011, Taipei.
• IJCAI Trustee (2011 - 2017), IJCAI 2015 Program Chair.
• Vice Chair of ACM SIGART (ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence). July 2010 -
       - Introduction to SIGART at Chinese Computer Federation:《中国计算机学会通讯》2011年第11期
• Founding Editor in Chief, ACM TIST (ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Manuscript Central is open for submissions).
• IJCAI-11 Chair of Special Track on Integrated and Embedded Artificial Intelligence (IEAI CFP)
• IEEE ICDM 2011: Vice Chair of Program Committee.
• ACM WSDM 2011 (Hong Kong, February 7-10, 2011), Publicity Chair and Senior PC.
• ACM KDD 2011: Senior PC Member
• AAAI 2011: Area Chair
• ACM UbiComp 2011: PC Member
• ACM CIKM 2011: Senior PC Member
• NSF Workshop on Pervasive Computing at Scale (PeCS 2011)
• The National Academies and A*STAR (Singapore) "Realizing the Value of Big Data", Article 1, Article 2
• MLA 2011: Chinese Workshop on Machine Learning Applications, Tsinghua University, Nov 2011.
• 2011 CCDM (2011中国数据挖掘年会), Industry Panel: Large Scale Recommendation Systems, May 5-7, 2011, Guangzhou, China
   
• ACM KDD 2010: PC Co-Chair, 2010 (KDD 2010 Social Network Site)
• ACM IUI 2010 (ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Conference, Feb 2010, Hong Kong, China), General Co-Chair
• 2010 ACM Hong Kong Bioinformatics Symposium (HKUST): PC Co-Chair
• Co-Guest Editor: IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Social Learning
• AAAI 2010 AI-Web: Senior PC
• 2010 Dragon-star Lecture on Data Mining (2010 龙星计划: May 10-14, 2010.)
• ACML 2010 Program Committee Co-Chair
• ICDM 2010: Vice PC Chair
• Co-organizer of MLA 2010: Machine Learning and Applications Workshop, Nanjing, Nov 7/8, 2010.

Advisory Committee Membership:

• Advisory Committee Member: IJCAI-11
• Steering Committee Member of Asia Conference on Machine Learning (ACML): 2009 - present
• Steering Committee Member of Advanced Data Mining and Application Conference (ADMA): 2008 - present
• Advisory Board of Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal (KM&EL): 2009 – present
• Advisory Board of International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (IJMLC): 2010 – present

Editorship:

• Editor in Chief, ACM TIST, 2009 -
• Associate Editor of the IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2005 -
• Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2005 - 2009
• Editorial Board Member of the Web Intelligence and Agent Systems Journal 2003 -
• Associate Editor in Chief of the Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2012 - (associate editor since 2007)
• Editorial Board Member of the Frontiers of Computer Science in China 2010 -

Research: Online Publication List

Datasets:

• Transfer Learning Survey, Software and Data Resources

• 2009 IEEE ICDM Data Mining Contest

• 2007 IEEE ICDM Data Mining Contest

• 2010 Microsoft Research Asia GeoLife Dataset (see papers at AAAI 2010 and WWW 2010)

Invited Talks:

• Invited Speaker at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM-12), Anaheim, CA USA, April 26-28, 2012.
• Invited Talk at 2nd International workshop on Sustainable Medical Collaboration in East & West 2011, KHU, Korea, Sept 22, 2011
• Keynote Talk at PCC (Chinese Pervasive Computing Conference, 2011), Title: "Collaborative, Cross-Domain Activity Recognition For Ambient Living (协作及跨域环境下的动作识别)", Sept 17, 2011, Tsinghua University, China.
• Invited Talk at MSRA-HIT Summer School on Natural Language Processing 2011 (Lecture Notes), Aug 1, 2011.
• Invited Talk at IJCAI Workshop on Social Web Mining: Transfer Learning in Social Recommendations.  July 25, 2011. Barcelona, Spain.
• Invited Talk at ICML Workshop on Unsupervised and Transfer Learning: Towards Heterogeneous Transfer Learning. Seattle, WA, July 2, 2011.
• Invited Talk at Tencent Business Intelligence Day: Large-scale User Behavior Data Mining: Challenges and Opportunities.  June 2011.
• Invited Talk at Machine Learning Summer School, Singapore, June 2011: Heterogeneous Transfer Learning with Applications.
• Keynote at 2011 Chinese Conference on Data Mining (CCDM 2011, 中国数据挖掘年会):  "From Learning by Analogy to Transfer Learning", May 2011, Guangzhou, China.
• Distinguished Lecture Series, Academia Sinica, Institute of Information Science, Taipei Taiwan. May 2011.
• Chinese Computer Federation, Youth Forum (YOCSEF) Invited Talk: "Activity Recognition based on Sensor Data", Beijing, Dec 2010. (Program, Paper)
• MLA 2010: Chinese Machine Learning and Applications Workshop. Nanjing, China.
• 2010 WISM 2010/AICI 2010, Keynote Speaker: Cross-Media Transfer Learning in Link Prediction. Oct 2010.
• 2010 Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Keynote Speech: Data Mining for Sensor-based Activity Recognition. Dec 2010.
• ICNC’10/FSKD’10 Keynote speech: Cross-Media Transfer Learning for Link Prediction. August 10, 2010 (FSKD2010 Photo)
• TAAI 2010 AI Forum: http://www.taai.org.tw/. Keynote Speech on Transfer Learning and Activity Recognition. Taiwan, May 2010.
• Nokia 2010 Workshop on Mobile Intelligent System. Invited Talk on Mobile Context Learning. Beijing, Apr. 2010.
• ICDM 2009 Workshop on Domain Driven Data Mining (http://datamining.it.uts.edu.au/dddm09/: Keynote Speech. Title: Transfer Leaning in Domain-driven Data Mining. Miami, USA. Dec 2009.
• IJCAI 2009 Invited Talk: Activity Recognition: Linking Low-level Sensors to High-level Intelligence,  Pasadena CA USA. July 17 2009. (Video&Slides @ Videolectures.net; and invited paper in PDF format)
• ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Invited Talk: Heterogeneous Transfer Learning with Real-world Applications, Singapore, August 2009 (Slides in PDF Format (2.5MB), and invited paper in PDF format)
• ACML 2009 Invited Talk: Transfer Learning Beyond Text Classification. Nanjing, China, November 2009
• Invited Talk: Enjoy Life Through Research.  2009 Hong Kong Baptist University, Graduate Research Symposium.
• Keynote Speech: Recent Advances on Transfer Learning, at 3^rd ISKE Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering, Xiamen, China, Nov 2008.
• Keynote Speech: An Introduction to Transfer Learning.  at Advanced Data Mining and Applications Conference (ADMA'08, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, Oct 2008)
• Invited Talk: Chinese Machine Learning Workshop MLA'07, Nanjing, China, Nov 2007 (program and slides)
• Keynote Speech: Mining the Web for Query Classification at NCIRCS'2007
• Invited talk at Sixth International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB2007), HKUST, Hong Kong. Title: Data Mining for Bioinformatics: Some Challenging Problems (ppt)
• 10 Challenging Problems for Data Mining -- A Position Presentation at ICDM 2005 Conference
  (also see http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~icdm/10Problems/index.shtml for a companion paper)
• Invited Talk Speaker for EWCBR2000, PRICAI2000 and Canadian AI Conference 2001

Publications:

Research papers: By Year | By Area

Books:

• Intelligent Planning -- A Decomposition and Abstraction Based Approach. Qiang Yang, Springer Verlag, 1997.
  - See a book review by Fausto Giunchiglia and Luca Spalazzi in the Artificial Intelligence Journal.
• Constraint-based Design Recovery for Software Reengineering: Theory and Experiments. Steven Woods, Alex Quilici and Qiang Yang. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dec. 1997.

Teaching:

• Spring 2012: Advanced Data Mining in Business Intelligence and Social Media (COMP 4332/RMBI4330)
• Fall 2011: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (MSC-IT 5210)
• Spring 2011: Research Topics in Social Networks, Social Media and Transfer Learning. (COMP 621U)
• Fall 2010: Introduction to Data Mining (COMP 337)
• Fall 2010: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (MSC-IT 521)
• Fall 2009: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (MSC-IT 521)
• Fall 2009: Introduction to Data Mining (COMP 337)
• Fall 2007/08: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (MSC-IT 521)
• Fall 2007: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (COMP 221)
• Fall 2006: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (COMP 221) and Introduction to Data Structures (COMP 171)
• Spring 2006: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (COMP 537) and Introduction to Data Structures (COMP 171)
• Spring 2004: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Databases (COMP 537)
• Summer 2003: Software Tools (COMP 111)
• Spring 2003: Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence (COMP221)
• Fall 2002: Software Tools with Unix Shell Programming and Perl Programming (COMP 111)
• Spring 2002 (Postgraduate Students): Knowledge Discovery in Databases (COMP 537).
• Fall 2001: Software Tools with Unix Shell Programming and Perl Programming (COMP 111)
• Teaching at Simon Fraser University and the University of Waterloo
• 2007 Dragon-star Lecture on Data Mining (龙星计划, 川大龙星计划)

Professional Organization, Memberships and Services:

• IEEE Fellow (2009 - ), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2011 - ),  AAAI Member, AAAS Member
• Guest Editors: IEEE Intelligent Systems: Social Learning (July/Aug 2010)
• Co-director and co-founder of HKUST Risk Management and Business Intelligence Program (RMBI Program) (2008-2011)
  Associate Director of HKUST FYT Graduate School Applied Genomic Center (2005-2009)
  Member of the HKUST University Senate (2008-2010), HKUST University/Engineering School Tenure and Promotion Committee (2008 - 2011)
• Organizing Committee Member: NIPS 2009 Workshop on Transfer Learning for Structured Data (TLSD-09).
• Co-Chair: The First International Workshop on Transfer Mining (IEEE ICDM 2009 Workshop).
• PC Co-Chair: 2010 ACM Hong Kong Bioinformatics Symposium (HKUST).
• Co-Guest Editor: IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Mobile Information Retrieval (Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2010) (Guest Editor's Introduction: PDF).
• General Co-Chair: 2009 Advanced Data Mining and Applications Conference (ADMA'09), Beijing China, August 2009 (Conference Photo 5MB).
• Chair: 2009 IEEE ICDM Data Mining Contest and 2007 IEEE ICDM Data Mining Contest.
• Co-Organizer: The 7th Chinese Workshop on Machine Learning and Applications MLA '09.
• Vice Chair in Knowledge Management Track: 2009 ACM CIKM Conference.
• Area Chair: the First Asian Machine Learning Conference (ACML 2009), Nov 2-4, 2009.
• Associate Editor: International Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems, Springer, 2003 - 2008.
• Co-Chair: the 2nd IEEE Pervasive Computing Conference, Workshop on Intelligent Pervasive Devices (PerDev2009).
• PC Member: NIPS 2009, ICDM 2009, IJCAI 2009, IJCAI 2009 Workshop on Grand Challenges for Reasoning from Experiences and Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge From Observations, etc.
• PC Member: the Fifth Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS 2009), ICCBR 2009.
• Program Chair: 2009 ACM-Hong Kong Student Research and Career Day.
• Guest Editor: IEEE Intelligent System, Special Issue on Data Mining and Bioinformatics (2005).
• Guest Editor: IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, Special Issue on Data Preparation (2006).
• Guest Editor: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Special Issue on Machine Learning and Bioinformatics (2005).
• Co-Guest Editor: IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Data and Information Cleaning and Preprocessing (2004).
• Co-Guest Editor: IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Mining the Web for Actionable Knowledge (2004).
• Co-Guest Editor: Applied Artificial Intelligence Journal, Special Issue on Data Cleaning and Preparation for Data Mining (2003).
• Co-Guest Editor: Computational Intelligence Journal, Special Issue on Case-Base Maintenance (2001).
• Program Co-Chair: The Ninth Biennial Pacific Rim Artificial Intelligence Conference (PRICAI 2006), Guilin, Guangxi, China, 2006.
• Program Co-Chair: 2007 Pacific Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2007), Nanjing, China, 2007.
• Tutorial Co-Chair: The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2005, and AAAI 2006) (Call for Tutorials).
• IEEE ICDM 2007 Data Mining Contest Co-Chair (Aug to Oct 2007): Link to 2007 ICDM Data Mining Contest and Data Sets.
• AAAI-08 AI on the Web Senior PC, ICML-08 PC, WWW-08 China Track PC, PAKDD 2008 Area Chair, PRICAI 2008 Area Chair, CIKM 2008 PC, WSDM 2008 PC, IEEE Percom Workshop on Power-aware Computing 2008/09, IUI-09 Senior PC, Workshop Chair, ACM SIGKDD Conference 2007.  Workshop CFP,  Workshop List.
• Industry Track & Demo-Exhibits Co-Chair: IEEE Web Intelligence Conference/ACM WI-Intelligent Agent Technology'04, Beijing, China.
• Co-Chair: AIPS Workshop on Real World Planning, Toulouse, France, 2002.
• Conference Committee Member and Reviewer: AAAI 2007, IJCAI 2007, KDD 2007, ICDM 2007, ICAPS 2007, ICCBR 2007, APBC07, AAAI04, ICDM 04, PRICAI04, KCAP03, ICCBR03, ICDM03, WISE03, ICAPS03, APWEB03, AAAI02, AIPS '02, IUI '02, AAMAS 02.
• Conference Chair: ICCBR 2001 (2001 International Conference on Case Based Reasoning, Vancouver BC, Canada).

Current Graduate Students:

• Evan Wei Xiang
• Derek Hao Hu
• Simone Marini (Co-supervised with Hannah Xue)
• Weike Pan (Co-supervised with Vincent Shen)
• Yin Zhu
• Erheng Zhong
• Weizhu Chen
• Si Shen (Co-supervised with Andrew Horner)
• Bin Wu (Co-supervised with Andrew Horner)
• Kaixiang Mo
• Ben Tan
• Zhongqi Lu
• Group Photos: 2007, 2009, ...

Past PhD Students at HKUST:

• Dr. Nathan Nan Liu, graduated in December, 2011. Thesis: Ranking Oriented Approach to Context Aware Recommendation.  Current:  Postdoc at HKUST, then Yahoo! Labs.
• Dr. Bin Cao, graduated in August, 2011.  Thesis: Collaborative and Transfer Learning in Recommendations. Current: Microsoft Research Asia.
• Dr. Vincent Wenchen Zheng, graduated in August, 2011.  Thesis: Learning with Limited Data in Sensor-based Human Behavior Recognition. Current: Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore.
• Dr. Can Yang, May, 2011.  Co-supervised with Weichuan Yu.  Thesis: SNP data analysis in genome-wide association studies.  Current: Yale University.
• Dr. Qian Xu, 2010.  Co-supervised with H. Xue. Thesis: Knowledge Transfer for Solving the Data Scarcity Problem for Machine Learning in Boinformatics.  Postdoc Fellow at HKUST.
• Dr. Sinno Jialin Pan.  Graduated in September 2010.  Thesis: Feature-based Transfer Learning with Real-world Applications.  Current: Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore.
• Dr. Jeffrey Junfeng Pan. Graduated in December 2007. Thesis: Learning-based Localization in Wireless and Sensor Networks.  Current: Facebook
• Dr. Dou Shen. Graduated in June 2007. Thesis: Learning Based Web Query Understanding, Current: BuzzLabs.
• Dr. Jie Yin. Graduated in June 2006. Thesis: Probabilistic Activity Recognition from Low-Level Sensors.  Research Scientist, CSIRO, Australia.

Other Past Students and Visitors

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Visits since Dec 1, 2005:	Visitors since Dec 1, 2005: