ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2926-4416
Scopus Author ID: 57199991626
Google Scholar Profile: Nkm9r2IAAAAJ

Metrics for Academic and Research Impact

BEng (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), MSc (University of Science and Technology of China), and PhD (Michigan State University)

Xiangyu Zhao is a tenured associate professor of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). He is designated as the CityU Thetos Young Scholar (two awardees per year). He worked as an assistant professor at CityU from Sep 2021, and then got an early promotion with tenure from July 2025. Prior to CityU, he completed his Ph.D. under Prof. Jiliang Tang at MSU, his M.S. under Prof. Enhong Chen at USTC, and his B.Eng. under Prof. Tao Zhou and Prof. Ming Tang at UESTC.

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

• Personalization, Recommender System, Search Engine, Online Advertising, and Information Retrieval
• Large Language Model, AGI, AutoML, Reinforcement Learning, Trustworthy AI, and Multimodal ML
• AI + X: Urban Computing & Smart City, Healthcare, and Education

His research has been awarded ICDM'22 and ICDM'21 Best-ranked Papers, Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award Nomination, Global Chinese AI Rising Stars (Top 25 in Data Mining), CCF-Tencent Open Fund (twice), HW Innovation Research Program (twice), Tencent Focused Research Fund (twice), CCF-Alimama Research Fund, HW Young Scholar Funding Scheme, Kuaishou Consultation Service, HKIDS Early Career Research Grant, and MSU Dissertation Fellowship. He is the principal awardee of the HKRGC Key Projects Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) and Research Impact Fund (RIF), marking him as the ONLY assistant professor to lead both such key projects in Hong Kong. He is the awardee of the CityU Outstanding Research Award and Thetos Young Scholar Award (two assistant professor awardees per year). He is among the Stanford World's Top 2% Scientists in 2024.

He serves as the top-tier Artificial Intelligence and Data Science conference chair and organizer at WWW'25, ICICIP'25, ISNN'25, WAIM'24, NLPCC'24, and ADC'24, and the journal editor at Neural Networks, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Frontiers in Big Data. He serves as the conference (senior) area chair and program committee member over 100 times. He serves as the workshop organizer at KDD'19, SIGIR'20/21/22/24, WWW'21/24, Recsys'23, 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 subscribers. The models and algorithms from his research have been launched in the online systems of various companies, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Criteo, Lyft, Baidu, Tencent, Ant Group, Kuaishou, and JD.com.

Machine Learning and Data Mining, Reinforcement Learning/AutoML/Multimodal, Information Retrieval (Recommender Systems, Online Advertising, Search Engine), Urban Computing and Spatio-Temporal Data Analysis, AI for Social Computing/Finance/Education/Ecosystem/Healthcare