Organizers
Meet the Organizers
Haoyu Han
Michigan State University
Haoyu Han is a senior Ph.D. student of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University (MSU). His supervisor is Dr. Jiliang Tang. Before joining MSU, he completed his M.S. (2021) and B.S. (2018) at USTC. His current research interests include LLMs and machine learning on graphs. After joining MSU, he has published several works in top conferences (e.g., KDD, ICDM, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR).
Xianfeng Tang is a senior Applied Scientist at Amazon. His research is mainly about machine learning, graph neural networks, data mining, and natural language understanding. He obtained a PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. He has published innovative works in top-tier conferences such as ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, KDD, etc.
Xianfeng Tang
Amazon
Senior Applied Scientist
Jing Huang
Amazon
Principal Scientist
Jing Huang is a principal scientist at Amazon. She and her team work on advanced conversational AI technology, pushing the boundaries of human-machine interactions with a better understanding of context, commonsense reasoning, and personal preferences; and building multi-modal generative AI technology using LLMs. Previously, she worked as a senior director and senior principal research scientist at JD AI Research and Platforms (JD.com). She has more than 20 years of invaluable industry R&D experience with a focus on cutting-edge AI technologies. Her portfolio is highlighted by groundbreaking research and product development in areas including multi-modal content generation (Generative AI), natural language processing (Foundation Models/LLMs, question answering, information extraction, sentiment analysis), conversational AI, knowledge graph and recommendation, speech recognition, and deep learning (GNNs and DNNs). She organized the 2023 AAAI Workshop on "Creative AI Across Modalities". She currently serves on the IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, and has been an associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing since 2021.
Monica Cheng is a senior Applied Scientist Manager at Amazon Search, leading a team of scientists and engineers in the search assistant at Amazon. Her team focuses on modeling shopping missions that convert the search engine from a stateless lookup tool into a stateful, multi-turn intelligent system and intelligent assistant engine. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Irvine.
Monica Cheng
Amazon
Senior Applied Scientist Manager
Omar Alonso is a senior applied science manager at Amazon. He is an experienced applied researcher working on the intersection of social data, information retrieval, knowledge graphs, and human computation/crowdsourcing. He is also a faculty member at Northeastern University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis and an undergraduate degree from UNICEN, Argentina.
Omar Alonso
Amazon
Senior Applied Scientist Manager
Hanqing Lu is a senior applied scientist at Amazon Search. He obtained a MS degree from the Machine Learning Department of Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are machine learning and data mining.
Hanqing Lu
Amazon
Senior Applied Scientist
Zhen Li is an Engineering Manager at Amazon Search, where he leads a team dedicated to enhancing customer conversation understanding to identify shopping intent. Before joining Amazon, Zhen spent several years at Facebook (now Meta), driving user growth and advertising initiatives. His expertise includes applying Graph Neural Network models for abuse detection and leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to innovate in e-commerce applications.
Zhen Li
Amazon
Engineering Manager
Chen Luo is a senior applied scientist at Amazon Search, leading a team of scientists and engineers in query understanding and its applications in matching, ranking, and advertising. His research focuses on scalable machine learning for information retrieval and recommender systems. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University and has published in ML and IR conferences and journals such as WWW, KDD, SIGIR, AAAI, and JMLR. He regularly serves as SPC or PC for NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, AAAI, and WWW.
Chen Luo
Amazon
Senior Applied Scientist
Dawei Yin is Senior Director of Engineering at Baidu inc.. He is managing the search science team at Baidu, leading Baidu’s science efforts of web search, question answering, video search, image search, news search, app search, etc.. Previously, he was Senior Director, managing the recommendation engineering team at JD.com between 2016 and 2020. Prior to JD.com, he was Senior Research Manager at Yahoo Labs, leading relevance science team and in charge of Core Search Relevance of Yahoo Search. He obtained Ph.D. (2013), M.S. (2010) from Lehigh University and B.S. (2006) from Shandong University. His research interests include data mining, applied machine learning, information retrieval and recommender system. He serves as conference organizers (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, WSDM) and journal editors (e.g., FnTIR). He published more than 100 research papers in premium conferences and journals, and was the recipient of 8 Best Paper Awards (or runner-ups), including KDD, WSDM, ICDM Best Paper Awards.
Dawei Yin
Baidu
Senior Director of Engineering
Jiliang Tang is University Foundation Professor in the computer science and engineering department at Michigan State University. His research interests include graph machine learning, trustworthy AI, and their applications in Education and Biology. He authored the first comprehensive book “deep learning on graphs” with Cambridge University Press and developed various well-received open-sourced tools including scikit-feature for feature selection, DeepRobust for trustworthy AI and DANCE for single-cell analysis. He was the recipient of various career awards (2022 IAPR J. K. AGGARWAL, 2022 SIAM SDM, 2021 IEEE ICDM, 2021 IEEE Big Data Security, 2020 ACM SIGKDD, 2019 NSF), numerous industrial faculty awards and 8 best paper awards (or runner-ups) including WSDM2018 and KDD2016. He serves as conference organizers (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, WSDM and SDM) and journal editors (e.g., TKDD, TOIS and TKDE). He has organized 20+ workshops in top AI conferences such as AI for Education in AAAI20, AAAI2021 Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education, DLG-AAAI'21 and DLG-AAAI'23. He has published his research in highly ranked journals and top conference proceedings, which have more than 41,000 citations with h-index 98 and extensive media coverage.
Jiliang Tang
Michigan State University
University Foundation Professor