Qiang Yang

Leader of research teams that won the 2004 and 2005 ACM KDDCUP international competitions on data mining, Yang has served as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and is an IEEE Fellow. His research interests include data mining and artificial intelligence (including automated planning, machine learning and activity recognition). He received his PhD from the Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland, College Park in 1989. He joined the University of Waterloo as an Assistant/Associate Professor between 1989 and 1995, and then served as a Professor and NSERC Industrial Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in Canada from 1995 to 2001.

His research teams won the 2004 and 2005 ACM KDDCUP international competitions on data mining. He has been an invited speaker at IJCAI 2009, ACL 2009, ACML 2009 and ADMA 2008, among others. Yang was elected as a Vice Chair of ACM SIGART in July 2010. He has served on the IJCAI 2011 advisory committee.

He has served as the founding Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST), and has served on the editorial board of IEEE Intelligent Systems and several other international journals. Yang has served as PC Co-Chair or General Co-Chair for a number of international conferences, including ACM KDD 2010, ACM IUI 2010, ACML 2010, PRICAI 2006, PAKDD 2007, ADMA 2009, ICCBR 2001, and others.

Among the numerous publications he has authored or co-authored, the most recent included: "Transferring Topical Knowledge from Auxiliary Long Text for Short Text Understanding", In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011), Glasgow, UK, Oct 2011 (Best interdisciplinary paper award), with Ou Jin, Nathan Nan Liu, and Yong Yu; "Understanding Click Noise: A Noise-aware Click Model for Web Search", In 5th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (ACM WSDM 2012), Seattle, Washington, USA, Feb 2012, with Weizhu Chen, Dong Wang, and Yuchen Zhang; "Beyond Ten Blue Links: Enabling User Click Modeling in Federated Web Search", In 5th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (ACM WSDM 2012), Seattle, Washington, USA, Feb 2012, with Danqi Chen, Weizhu Chen and Zheng Chen; and "Personalized Click Model through Collaborative Filtering", In 5th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (ACM WSDM 2012), Seattle, Washington, USA, Feb 2012, with Si Shen, Botao Hu and Weizhu Chen.