Xiangyu Zhao   赵翔宇

              Assistant Professor


               Applied Machine Learning Lab
               School of Data Science
               City University of Hong Kong (CityU)

Email: xy.zhao [at] cityu.edu.hk [contact me]
Mail: Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong 999077
Links: [LinkedIn]     [Publications]    [Google Scholar]     [Services]    [Grants&Awards]    [Teach&Talk]    [Experiences]

Brief Biography

Xiangyu Zhao is a tenure-track assistant professor of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). Prior to CityU, he completed his Ph.D. under the advisory of Prof. Jiliang Tang at DSE Lab of MSU, his M.S. under the advisory of Prof. Enhong Chen at BDAA Lab of USTC, and his B.Eng. under the advisory of Prof. Ming Tang and Prof. Tao Zhou at BigData Center of UESTC.

His current research interests include data mining and machine learning, especially

  • Personalization, Recommender System, Online Advertising, Search Engine, and Information Retrieval
  • Urban Computing, Smart City, GeoAI, Spatio-Temporal Data Analysis, and Location-Based Social Networks
  • Large Language Model, Reinforcement Learning, AutoML, AGI, Graph Learning, Trustworthy AI, and Multimodal ML
  • AI + X: Education, Healthcare, Carbon Neutral, Social Computing, E-commerce, Finance, and Ecosystem
  • His research has been awarded ICDM'22 and ICDM'21 Best-ranked Papers, Global Top 100 Chinese New Stars in AI, CCF-Ant Research Fund, CCF-Tencent Open Fund (twice), Ant Group Research Fund, Tencent Focused Research Fund, Criteo Faculty Research Award, Bytedance Research Collaboration Program, MSU Dissertation Fellowship, and nomination for Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. He serves as top data science conference (senior) program committee members, session chairs and journal reviewers. He serves as the organizers of DRL4KDD and DRL4IR workshops at KDD'19, WWW'21, SIGIR'20/21/22 and CIKM'23, and a lead tutor at KDD'23, WWW'21/22/23, IJCAI'21/23 and WSDM'23. He also serves as the founding academic committee member of MLNLP, the largest Chinese AI community with millions of members/followers. The models and algorithms from his research have been launched in the online system of many companies, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Criteo, Lyft, JD.com, Kuaishou, Tencent, and Bytedance.

    Openings:
    • I have PhD and Joint-PhD (双一流A类+国科大) positions in Spring and Fall every year
    • Postdoc, Self-financed PhD, Part-time PhD, RA and Visiting positions are open year round
    • Please click HERE for more details (CityU is ranked around #50 in QS World University Rankings 2016-2023)
    Call for Paper:
    • Graph Learning for Recommendations @ Frontiers in Big Data [Website] (Jan 15, 2023)
    Advertisement of our Survey Papers:
    • Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs) [link]
    • Automated Machine Learning for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey [link]
    • Multi-Task Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey [link]
    • Multimodal Recommender Systems: A Survey [link]
    • A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Recommender Systems [link]
    • Deep Reinforcement Learning for Search, Recommendation, and Online Advertising: A Survey [link]
    • Crime in Urban Areas: A Data Mining Perspective [link]

    News [lab's news]

    • 09/2023: 7 PhD students (Wenlin, Zichuan, Dayan, Yusheng, Jiawei, Siqi and Derong) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
    • 09/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of WWW'24 and SDM'24
    • 08/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'24
    • 07/2023: I am honored to receive the CCF-Tencent Open Fund (CCF-腾讯犀牛鸟基金) for the second time
    • 07/2023: An invited talk at Baidu
    • 06/2023: I am honored to receive the Tencent Rhino-Bird Focused Research Fund (腾讯广告犀牛鸟专项研究计划)
    • 06/2023: I am honored to receive the Ant Group Research Fund (蚂蚁集团研究基金)
    • 06/2023: I will serve as the SPC Member of AAAI'24
    • 05/2023: I will serve as the SPC Member of CIKM'23
    • 05/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of ACM MM'23
    • 05/2023: 1 tutorial (Trustworthy RS) got accepted by KDD'23
    • 05/2023: I am honored to receive the Environment and Conservation Fund (ECF) with Dr.Liang Dong and Prof.Joe Qin
    • 05/2023: Congratulations to our team for winning the Silver Medal at the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva
    • 04/2023: We will co-organize the DLP workshop @ CIKM'23
    • 04/2023: 2 tutorials (Joint Modeling in RS & Trustworthy RS) got accepted by IJCAI'23
    • 03/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of NeurIPS'23, RecSys'23, ICDM'23 and IEEE BigData'23
    • 03/2023: An invited talk for undergraduates at CSE, CUHK
    • 03/2023: An invited talk at BigsCity, BUAA
    • 02/2023, I am honored to receive the Midstream Research Programme for Universities (MRP) with Dr.Zijun Zhang
    • 02/2023: Our new survey Multi-Task Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey is online
    • 02/2023: Our new survey Multimodal Recommender Systems: A Survey is online
    • 01/2023: 2 PhD students (Pengyue and Xiaopeng) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
    • 12/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of KDD'23 (Both tracks) and ICML'23
    • 12/2022: I will serve as the Senior PC Member of SIGIR'23 and IJCAI'23
    • 12/2022: I am honored to receive the CCF-Ant Research Fund (CCF-蚂蚁科研基金)
    • 12/2022: We will provide a tutorial of AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems @ WSDM'23
    • 12/2022: We will provide a tutorial of Trustworthy Recommender Systems @ WWW'23
    • 12/2022: Our team won the Outstanding Project (8/34) in CCF-Tencent Open Fund 2021
    • 11/2022: Our ICDM'22 paper AutoAssign was selected as one of the best-ranked papers
    • 10/2022: I am honored to join the Distinguished Review Board for ACM Transactions on the Web
    • 09/2022: I will serve as the Senior PC Member of WWW'23
    • 09/2022: I am honored to receive one Early Career Research Grant from HKIDS with Dr.Zijun Zhang
    • 09/2022: 11 PhD students (Yejing, Jingtong, Yuhao, Yuanshao, Ziru, Langming, Maolin, Xiao, Zijian, Qidong and Wei) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
    • 08/2022: Our team won the Gold Medal and Top 10 best innovation award in the 7th International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada (iCAN 2022), co-supervised with Dr. Liang Dong
    • 08/2022: A keynote talk at DLP workshop @ KDD'22
    • 07/2022: I will serve as the Senior PC Member of AAAI'23
    • 07/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'23
    • 07/2022: I co-host the 3rd Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval @ SIGIR'22
    • 06/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of ICDM'22
    • 05/2022: Our team won the Gold Award with Grand Prize (US$13,000) and the Microsoft Outstanding AI Influencer Award in the Global AI Challenge for Building E&M Facilities, co-supervised with Prof. S Joe QIN
    • 05/2022: Our team ranked the 3rd place in Carbon Neutral Competition track of the 3rd Shandong Data Competition, co-supervised with Prof. S Joe QIN
    • 05/2022: I am honored to receive two SIRG grants with Dr.Liang Dong and Dr.Junming Liu at CityU
    • 04/2022: We provide tutorial Automated Machine Learning for Recommendations @ WWW'22
    • 04/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of NeurIPS'22, CIKM'22, ECML-PKDD'22, IEEE BigData'22
    • 03/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of RecSys'22
    • 03/2022: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by SIGIR'22
    • 01/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of SIGIR'22
             [2021]
             [2020]
    • 12/2020: 1 tutorial got accepted by WWW'21
    • 12/2020: I will serve as the Senior PC Member of IJCAI'21
    • 12/2020: Awarded MSU Dissertation Completion Fellowship
    • 12/2020: 1 paper got accepted by AAAI'21
    • 11/2020: Passed my comprehensive exam!
    • 11/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of KDD'21
    • 11/2020: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by WWW'21
    • 11/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of ECIR'21
    • 11/2020: I will serve as the Session Chair of ICONIP'20
    • 10/2020: 1 paper got accepted by WSDM'21
    • 10/2020: 1 paper got accepted by ICDE'21
    • 09/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IJCAI'21
    • 09/2020: Received the CIKM'20 Student Travel Award
    • 08/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of AAAI'21
    • 08/2020: Received the KDD'20 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 07/2020: 1 paper got accepted by CIKM'20
    • 07/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'21
    • 06/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of CIKM'20
    • 06/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of ICONIP'20
    • 05/2020: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'20
    • 05/2020: 2 papers got accepted by SIGIR'20
    • 05/2020: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at INFORMS'20 Annual Meeting
    • 05/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IEEE BigData'20
    • 04/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IRS@KDD'20
    • 03/2020: I will co-host the Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval @ SIGIR'20
    • 03/2020: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by SIGIR'20
             [2019]
    • 12/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of AI4EDU'20
    • 12/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of IJCAI'20
    • 11/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at East China Normal University
    • 08/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'20
    • 08/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at Shandong University
    • 07/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of AAAI'20
    • 07/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at Beijing University Of Chemical Technology
    • 07/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at TAL(好未来)
    • 06/2019: Received the KDD'19 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 06/2019: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'19 workshop
    • 05/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of RL4RealLife@ICML'19
    • 05/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of NLPCC'19
    • 04/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of IEEE BigData'19
    • 03/2019: I will host the Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery @ KDD'19
    • 03/2019: 1 Workshop proposal got accepted by KDD'19
    • 02/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of RecSys'19
    • 02/2019: 1 survey paper got accepted by ACM SIGWEB Newsletter
             [2018]
    • 11/2018: Received Outstanding Master's Thesis Award from Anhui Computer Federation
    • 11/2018: I was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Leiphone.com(雷锋网大课堂)
    • 10/2018: Dr.Dawei Yin was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at CAS-AMSS(中科院数学所)
    • 10/2018: Dr.Jiliang Tang was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Criteo, Ann Arbor
    • 10/2018: Dr.Dawei Yin was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Tsinghua University
    • 09/2018: Dr.Long Xia was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at CAS-ICT(中科院计算所)
    • 08/2018: I was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Gifshow(快手)
    • 08/2018: Dr.Jiliang Tang was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Bytedance(今日头条)
    • 07/2018: Our RL-based recommender project received the Criteo Faculty Research Award
    • 07/2018: Received the RecSys'18 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 07/2018: I will serve as the PC Member of IEEE BigData'18
    • 07/2018: 1 paper got accepted by RecSys'18
    • 06/2018: Received the KDD'18 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 05/2018: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'18
    • 04/2018: 1 survey paper got accepted by ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
    • 02/2018: Received the SDM'18 Student Travel Award and will participate in the Doctoral Forum
             [2017]
    • 09/2017: Received the CIKM'17 Student Travel Award
    • 09/2017: 1 paper got accepted by ICDM'17 PhD Forum
    • 08/2017: 1 paper got accepted by ICDM'17
    • 08/2017: 1 paper got accepted by CIKM'17
    • 01/2017: Joined MSU as a Ph.D. student of computer science