I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Airbnb leading the Core Ranking team for Airbnb Relevance & Personalization, responsible for developing ranking AI solutions for home search and experience products. Previously, I was a Senior Engineering Manager at LinkedIn leading the AI Algorithms Foundation team, responsible for developing horizontal AI technologies for search and recommender systems w.r.t. Natural Language Processing, Ranking, and Personalization. Before joining LinkedIn, I was a research intern at IBM Research Almaden, and an engineering intern at LinkedIn. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University under the supervision of Dr. Huan Liu, with research focus on data mining and machine learning. I received my Master and Bachelor degrees from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

Recent News

• [New] Our paper on Learning To Rank Diversely At Airbnb is accepted by CIKM 2023 Applied Research track.
• [New] I’ll give a tutorial with my colleagues on “Data-centric AI: Techniques and Future Perspectives” at KDD 2023 on Aug 8.
• [New] Our paper on Optimizing Airbnb Search Journey with Multi-task Learning is accepted by KDD 2023 Applied Data Science track.
• Our paper on Generalized Deep Mixed Models (Github) is accepted by KDD 2022 Applied Data Science track.
• It was my great pleasure to get interviewed by TWIML AI Podcast: Building a Unified NLP Framework at LinkedIn with Huiji Gao, May 2021.
• Our paper on AutoDim: Field-aware Embedding Dimension Search in Recommender Systems is accepted by WWW 2021.
• I’ll give two tech talks with my colleagues on “DeText: A Framework for Deep Natural Language Processing at Linkedin” and “GDMix: A Deep Ranking Personalization Framework” at Nvidia GPU Technology Conference 2021 on Apr 2021.
• Our work on Achieving High-Quality Search and Recommendation Results with DeepNLP is reported by NVIDIA Developer Blog, Feb, 2021.
• It was my great pleasure to talk about NLP@LinkedIn at Open Core Summit 2020, Dec 2020.
• Our paper on DeText has won the Best Paper Award at CIKM 2020 applied research track.
• I’ll give two tech talks with my colleagues on “DeText: A Framework for Deep Natural Language Understanding at LinkedIn” at AI Camp and NYNLP Meetup on Oct 19 and Oct 22, respectively.
• We open sourced (Github) GDMix: A Deep Ranking Personalization Framework. The work is reported by VB.
• I’ll give a hands-on tutorial with my colleagues on “Deep Learning for Search and Recommender Systems in Practice” at KDD 2020 on Aug 26.
• We open sourced (Github) DeText: A deep NLP framework for intelligent text understanding. The work is reported by Fortune, VB, and THENEWSTACK.
• Three papers: “DeText: A Deep Text Ranking Framework with BERT”, “Efficient Neural Query Auto Completion”, and “Improving Search Query Suggestion With User Feedback” are accepted by CIKM 2020.
• Our work on LiBERT, BERT model trained and calibrated on LinkedIn data, is reported by Fortune Magazine: A.I. breakthroughs in natural-language processing are big for business.
• I’ll co-organize The First Deep Natural Language Processing for Search and Recommendation Workshop held in conjunction with SIGIR 2020 on July 30.
• One paper on “Personalized Query Suggestions” is accepted by SIGIR 2020.
• I’ll give a tutorial with my colleagues on “Deep Natural Language Processing for Search and Recommender Systems” at KDD 2019 in Alaska, USA, on Aug 4, 2019.
• I’ll give a tutorial with my colleagues on “Deep Natural Language Processing for Search Systems” at SIGIR 2019 in Paris, France on July 21, 2019.
• I’ll give a tech talk with my colleagues on “Deep Natural Language Processing for Search Systems” at the AI Tech Meetup – by LinkedIn, Uber and Facebook at LinkedIn, Mountain View on May 9, 2019.
• My first book on “Mining Human Mobility in Location-Based Social Networks” is published by Morgan & CLaypool, 2015.
• I will join LinkedIn as an Applied Research Engineer in 2015.
• One paper on “Content-Aware Point of Interest Recommendation on Location-Based Social Networks” is accepted by AAAI 2015.
• I will give a tutorial on location recommendation at ACM RecSys 2014 in Foster City, CA, on Oct 6th.
• I will join LinkedIn as an engineering Intern in summer 2014.
• Received ASU Graduate Education Dissertation Fellowship (Awarded to 1 student in CIDSE, fewer than 25 in ASU).
• Two papers accepted by ICWSM 2014.
• Received the 2014 ASU President’s Award for Innovation.
• One book chapter “Data Analysis on Location-Based Social Networks” is published by Springer, 2014
• I will give an oral presentation at ACM RecSys 2013 in Hong Kong, China, on Oct 14th.
• I will give an oral presentation at ASONAM 2013 in Niagara Falls, Canada, on Aug 28th.
• I will join IBM Almaden Research Center as a Research Intern in summer 2013.
• I will give an oral presentation in CIKM 2012 in Maui, Hawaii, on Oct 30th.
• Awarded the third prize in task “Next Place Prediction” at the Mobile Data Challenge by Nokia.
• One paper on “eTrust: Understanding Trust Evolution in an Online World” is accepted by KDD 2012.