I am a postdoctoral researcher of Computer Science in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with Professor Jiawei Han. I completed my Ph.D. in Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, Beijing with Dissertation Award in 2015. I visited Professor Christos Faloutsos at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and visited Professor V.S. Subrahmanian at University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park in 2016. [C.V.]

My research focuses on developing data-driven approaches of online behavior analysis for applications such as future behavior prediction, social recommendation, fraud detection, and event summarization, called Data-Driven Behavioral Analytics. It is at the intersection of social media analysis, spatiotemporal data mining, text mining, information extraction, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

What's New

• May 2017: I am teaching summer course UIUC CS412: An Introduction to Data Warehousing and Data Mining from May 30 to August 3! (11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m., MTR, 0216SC)
• March 2017: I feel excited to join the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame as a tenure-track assistant professor in Fall 2017! I am recruiting Ph.D. students and visiting scholars.
• May 2017: Two papers were accepted to KDD 2017 on (1) "meta pattern" information extraction and (2) causal analysis of human behaviors.
• April 2017: One paper was accepted to IJCAI 2017 on disease-symptom network representation learning.
• April 2017: Two tutorials were accepted to KDD 2017: (1) Data-Driven Approaches towards Malicious Behavior Modeling and (2) Mining Entity-Relation-Attribute Structures from Massive Text Data. See you this August in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada!
• January 2017: Tutorials on turning massive, unstructured text corpora into machine-actionable structures were accepted to WWW 2017 and SIGMOD 2017.
• November 2016: One full paper was accepted to AAAI 2017 on causal analysis of behavior.
• October 2016: A tutorial was delivered at CIKM 2016 on Data-Driven Behavioral Analytics: Observations, Representations and Models with Professor Peng Cui and Professor Jiawei Han.
• September 2016: Two short papers were accepted to ICDM 2016 on (1) causal analysis of human behaviors and (2) large network representation learning.
• May 2016: A full paper CatchTartan: Representing and Summarizing Dynamic Multicontextual Behaviors was accepted to SIGKDD 2016 with oral presentation.
• January 2016: A survey paper Suspicious Behavior Detection: Current Trends and Future Directions on the Special Issue on Online Behavioral Analysis and Modeling, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Latest Publications

• MetaPAD: Meta Patten Discovery from Massive Text Corpora, KDD, 2017.
• Estimating Treatment Effect in the Wild via Differentiated Confounder Balancing, KDD, 2017.
• ContextCare: Incorporating Contextual Information Networks to Representation Learning in Medical Forum Data, IJCAI, 2017.
• Treatment Effect Estimation with Data-Driven Variable Decomposition, AAAI, 2017.
• Steering Social Media Promotions with Effective Strategies, ICDM, 2016.
• Large-Scale Embedding Learning in Heterogeneous Event Data, ICDM, 2016.
• CatchTartan: Representing and Summarizing Dynamic Multicontextual Behaviors, KDD, 2016.
• Spotting Suspicious Behaviors in Multimodal Data: A General Metric and Algorithms, TKDE, 2016.
• Little is Much: Bridging Cross-Platform Behaviors through Overlapped Crowds, AAAI, 2016.
• Suspicious Behavior Detection: Current Trends and Future Directions, Special Issue on Online Behavioral Analysis and Modeling, IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine, 2016.
• Catching Synchronized Behaviors in Large Networks: A Graph Mining Approach, Special Issue on the Best of SIGKDD 2014, TKDD, 2016.

Last updated on April 23, 2017.