Qiang Yang

Qiang Yang

WeBank AI
Professor Emeritus at Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Email: qyang at cse ust hk

Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence: Federated Learning, Transfer Learning, Machine Learning, Planning, Data Mining

DBLP Publication List | Google Scholar | HKUST Library | Orcid

Positions and Education:

2023 – Present: Professor Emeritus at HKUST.
2018 - Present: Chief AI Officer, WeBank.
2015-2023: Chair Professor at HKUST, Computer Science and Engineering Department.
2015 - 2018: CSE Department Head, University New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor, Founding Director, HKUST Big Data Institute, Founding Director, Wechat-HKUST Joint Lab on AI (WHATLAB), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2012 - 2014, Founding Director, Huawei Noah Ark Research Lab
2001- 2012: HKUST: Full Professor (2007 - ) Associate Department Head (PG and Research) (2011 - 2012), Postgraduate Coordinator (2007-2009), Associate Professor, 2001-2007, Founding Co-Director of RMBI Program HKUST (2007-2011)
1995 - 2001: NSERC Industry Research Chair (1995-2001), Associate/Full Professor at Simon Fraser University, BC Canada (1995 - 2001)
1989 - 1995: Assistant/Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont. Canada
1999 - 2000: Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research China and University of Washington, USA
Laboratory Affiliations: AI and Databases
B.Sc. (1982) Astrophysics at Peking University, Beijing, China. CUSPEA program (Class of 1982)
M.Sc. (1985) Astrophysics, University of Maryland, USA. Supervisor Dr. Donat Wentzel
M.Sc. (1987) Computer Science, University of Maryland, USA
PhD (1989) Computer Science, University of Maryland, USA (My supervisor Dana S. Nau). 2017 UMD-CSD Alumni Hall of Fame

Professional Society Fellowship:

Fellow of Royal Society of Canada and Canadian Academy of Engineering 2021 - present
AAAI Fellow (2013 - ) Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

for significant contributions to AI Planning, Data Mining and Case-based Reasoning
Link to AAAI page.

AAAS Fellow (2012 - ) American Association for the Advancement of Science

for significant contributions to Data Mining, Learning and Planning: theory, applications, and services
Link to AAAS, Oriental Daily

IAPR Fellow (2012 -) International Association of Pattern Recognition

for significant contributions to Data Mining and Transfer Learning
Link to IAPR: International Association of Pattern Recognition

IEEE Fellow (2009 - ) Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

for Significant Contributions to the Understanding and Application of Intelligent Planning, Learning and Data Mining
Link to HKUST News Release

ACM Fellow (2017 - ) Association of Computing Machinery, for contributions to Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining. Link to ACM Page
CAAI Fellow (2019 - ) Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence.

Awards:

IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award, 2023.
ACM TIST Journal "Most Downloaded and Cited Paper": `Federated Machine Learning: Concept and Applications.' Authors: Qiang Yang, Yang Liu et al. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Volume 10, Issue 2, Article No.: 12. pp 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3298981
Innovative Application of AI Award, AAAI - "Contribution-Aware Federated Learning for Smart Healthcare", 2022
IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award: K. Cheng, et al.,”SecureBoost: A Lossless Federated Learning Framework” IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 36, no. 06, pp. 87-98, November – December 2021
Innovative Application of AI Award, AAAI - "FedVision: An Online Visual Object Detection Platform powered by Federated Learning", 2020
PAKDD 2019 Best Paper Award, 2019
Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Award, 2018, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), USA.
2018 Best Paper Award, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems (ACM TiiS)
ACM SIGKDD Distinguished Service Award, 2017
University of Maryland, Computer Science Department Alumni Hall of Fame, 2017
HKUST School of Engineering, Distinguished Research Excellence Award, 2016
Two champions, Nokia Mobile Data Challenge (Nokia MDC), 2012: see Announcement.
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

Conference and Society Activities:

Chairman of the TSC Committee, Federated Learning Open Source Community FATE
AAAI Executive Council Member (2016 - 2020). General Chair, AAAI 2021, Vancouver, Canada.
President of IJCAI (2017 - 2019), Member of IJCAI Trustee: 2011-2021.
President, Hong Kong AI and Robotics Society (HKSAIR), 2018 - present
Chair, ACM SIGKDD China Chapter (2016 - 2022)
Program Chair, IJCAI 2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina from July 25th to August 1st, 2015.
Best Paper Award Committee Chair, ACM WSDM 2015.
Chinese AI Society, 中国人工智能学会, 副理事长2014 -
General co-chair: ACM RecSys 2013, Hong Kong, China, Oct 2013.
Program co-chair: IEEE Big Data Conference, 2013. CA USA Oct 2013.
General Chair, ACM KDD 2012, Beijing, China, Aug 12-16, 2012. Interviewing Chinese KDD Scholars for KDD 2012: A Conversation with the Chinese KDD Leaders (link).
IJCAI Trustee (2011 - 2017), IJCAI 2013 Publicity Chair and Area Chair.
Vice Chair of ACM SIGART (ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence). July 2010.
More Conference Activities

Advisory Committee Membership:

Advisory Committee Chair, ACM TIST 2015 -
Trustee, IJCAI Inc (2011-2021)
Advisory Committee Member of ACM SIGAI, Feb 2014 - present
Steering Committee Member of Asia Conference on Machine Learning (ACML): 2009 - 2015
Advisor: University of Macau

Editorship:

· ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Founding Editor in Chief, 2009 – 2015. Advisory Committee Chair 2015 – present.

· IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Founding Editor in Chief, January 1, 2015 – 2020. Advisory Committee Chair: 2015 – present.

· Associate Editor of AI Magazine, 2012 – 2020.

· Associate Editor of IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2005 – 2020.

· Series Editor for Morgan&Claypool Synthesis Series: On Research Methodology

· Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2005 - 2009

Research Projects

Datasets:

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 Publishers, Dec. 1997.

· Crafting Your Research Future: A Guide to Successful Master's and Ph.D. Degrees in Science & Engineering. By Charles X. Ling and Qiang Yang, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, PDF here.. Chinese Version: 学术研究，你的成功之道。 Tsinghua University Press, November 2012

· Transfer Learning, Qiang Yang et al. Cambridge University Press. 2020.. Chinese: 迁移学习. 华章出版社，机械工业出版社， 2020)

· Federated Learning, Qiang Yang et al. Morgan Claypool Publishers 2020.

· 联邦学习 (Chinese version of the Federated Learning Book) 杨强，刘洋，等。电子工业出版社 2020.

· 联邦学习实战，(Practicing Federated Learning) 杨强，黄安埠，等。电子工业出版社Publishing House of Electronics Industry. 2021.

· 隐私计算， Privacy Preserving Computing, Kai Chen and Qiang Yang, Publishing House of Electronics Industry. 电子工业出版社2022.

· 可解释人工智能导论Introduction to Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Qiang Yang, Lixin Fan et al. 电子工业出版社Publishing House of Electronics Industry. 2022.

· Federated Learning: Privacy and Incentive. Edited by Qiang Yang, Lixin Fan, Han Yu. Springer 2020.

· Federated and Transfer Learning. Editors: Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Boyu Wang, Matthew E. Taylor, Qiang Yang. Springer, 2023.

· Privacy-preserving Computing for Big Data Analytics and AI. Kai Chen and Qiang Yang. Cambridge University Press. 2024.

Teaching:

HKUST Masters of Science in Big Data Technology: MSBD 5001
Dragonstar Lectures in Ren Min University, May 2012
Spring 2012: COMP 4332: Advanced Data Mining in Business Intelligence and Social Media (COMP 4332/RMBI4310)
Spring 2011: Research Topics in Social Networks, Social Media. (COMP 621U)
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)
Other teaching activities at HKUST

Hong Kong Services:

Hong Kong RGC Engineering Research Panel (2009 - 2011)
Expert Group on Cloud Computing Services and Standards (Office of the HK Government Chief Information Officer, 2012 -)
More Services at HKUST

Students: Photos: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013 ...

· Dr. Xueyang Wu

· Dr. Guangneng Hu, Xidian University， Xi An

· Dr. Zheng Li, Amazon.com， USA

· Dr. Yexin Li, JD.com, Beijing

· Dr. Yinghua Zhang, Meituan Inc. Shanghai.

· Dr. Lili Zhao, Tencent， Shenzhen

· Dr. Wenyuan Dai, 4^th Paradigm Inc.

· Dr. Kaixiang Mo, SHEIN, Singapore

· Dr. Ben Tan, Tencent, Shenzhen

· Dr. Bin Wu (Co-supervised with Andrew Horner), Tencent

· Dr. Zhongqi Lu, China University of Petroleum, China

· Dr. Ying Wei, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

· Dr. Bo Liu, Bytedance, Shenzhen

· George (Georgios) Trimponias, graduated in Feb 2015. Thesis: Game-Theoretic Design for Assignment and Ranking in Online Advertising and Human Computation, Now: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab.

· Dr. Yin Zhu, graduated in August 2014. Thesis: Activity Recognition via Social Knowledge Transfer. July 21, 2014.

· Dr. Erheng Zhong, graduated in Feb 2014. Thesis: Composite Social Network Analysis (PDF). Now: Yahoo! Labs., USA.

· Dr. Derek Hao Hu, graduated in Dec 2012. Thesis: Learning based Activity Recognition (PDF). Now: Microsoft (Bing) at Redmond, Washington, USA.

· Dr. Weizhu Chen, graduated in Aug 2012. Thesis: An Associative Characterization of Click Models in Web Search (PDF). Now: Microsoft (Bing) at Redmond, Washington, USA.

· Dr. Simone Marini, graduated in Aug 2012. Thesis: Qualitative and Quantitative Protein Interaction Prediction with Machine Learning. Now: Postdoc in Italy.

· Dr. Evan Wei Xiang, graduated in June 2012. Thesis: Transfer Learning with Open Web Data (PDF). Now: Baidu.com

· Dr. Weike Pan, graduated in June, 2012. Thesis: Transfer Learning in Collaborative Filtering (PDF). Now: Assistant Professor at Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.

· Si Shen

· Dr. Nathan Nan Liu, graduated in December, 2011. Thesis: Ranking Oriented Approach to Context Aware Recommendation (PDF). Current: Yahoo! Labs.

· Dr. Bin Cao, graduated in August, 2011. Thesis: Collaborative and Transfer Learning in Recommendations (PDF). Current: Microsoft Research Asia.

· Dr. Vincent Wenchen Zheng, graduated in August, 2011. Thesis: Learning with Limited Data in Sensor-based Human Behavior Recognition (PDF). Current: Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore.

· Dr. Qian Xu, graduated in Nov 2010. Co-supervised with Hong Xue. Thesis: Knowledge Transfer for Solving the Data Scarcity Problem for Machine Learning in Boinformatics (PDF). Now: Baidu.com

· Dr. Can Yang, graduated in May, 2011. Co-supervised with Weichuan Yu. Thesis: SNP data analysis in genome-wide association studies (PDF). Now: Yale University, USA.

· Dr. Sinno Jialin Pan. Graduated in September 2010. Thesis: Feature-based Transfer Learning with Real-world Applications (PDF). 2010- 2014: Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore. 2014 -: Nanyang Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

· Dr. Jeffrey Junfeng Pan. Graduated in December 2007. Thesis: Learning-based Localization in Wireless and Sensor Networks (PDF). Current: Facebook

· Dr. Dou Shen. Graduated in June 2007. Thesis: Learning Based Web Query Understanding (PDF). co-founder: BuzzLabs, and 2011-2012: Senior Director, CityGrid Media. 2012-2014: Director of Advertisement Union, Baidu Inc. 2014- : Director of Search and Personalization, Baidu Inc. Beijing, China.

· Dr. Jie Yin. Graduated in June 2006. Thesis: Probabilistic Activity Recognition from Low-Level Sensors (PDF). Research Scientist, CSIRO, Australia.

· Dr. Steven Woods, Senior Engineering Director, Google Canada (Wiki). Thesis (1996): A Method of Program Understanding using Constraint Satisfaction for Software Reverse Engineering. University of Waterloo, Canada. Now: Engineering Director of Google Canada.

· Eugene Fink, CMU

· Alex Chan

Postdoc Fellows

· Xiaojin Zhang

· Hao Liu

· Zelei Liu

· Leye Wang

· Wei Hui

· Yiqiang Chen

· Rong Pan