AI Executive Leader
As an executive AI leader, I have gained expertise in helping organizations build AI teams, shaping AI mindsets, and forming product visions and strategies around AI-first principles. I specialize in Search, Recommendation & Advertising for Modern Marketplaces (e.g., Jobs, E-commerce, etc.) and have deep experience transforming AI solutions into business upsides.
Presently, I serve as a Director of Engineering, AI at LinkedIn, where I am responsible for overseeing the world’s largest professional network with nearly 660+ million users in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. As a data science and machine learning leader, I work closely with cross-functional executive-level leaders to bring an AI mindset to our business transformation, shaping product visions and strategies to meet our goals. To drive AI solutions for LinkedIn Talent Solutions and LinkedIn China, I lead multiple teams comprising nearly 60 ML engineers and applied researchers, building cross-functional teams with product, data science, and infrastructure expertise to streamline innovation and drive success for our organization.
Prior to joining LinkedIn, I served as a Director of Data Science and Machine Learning at Etsy, where I was instrumental in growing a team of five members to an organization of 40 data scientists and machine learning engineers, with teams in New York City and San Francisco. The centralized organization I developed delivered critical machine learning solutions on Etsy’s search and recommendation products, contributing to its early success in applying AI to products. Before Etsy, I worked as a Senior Manager of Research at Yahoo Research from 2013 to 2016. I hold a Ph.D. (2013), M.S. (2010) from Lehigh University and B.S. (2007) from Beijing University of Chemical Technology, all in Computer Science.
In addition to these roles, as an industrial researcher, I co-authored papers in all major international conferences in data mining and applied machine learning including SIGIR, WWW, KDD, CIKM, AAAI, WSDM, RecSys, and ICML with more than 6,100 citations (H-index: 26), winning multiple paper awards (WWW 2011, WSDM 2023, RecSys 2014). I also regularly serve as senior or regular program committee members in KDD, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, AAAI, EMNLP, ICWSM, ACL, CIKM, IJCAI as well as constantly reviewing articles in most prestigious journals such as DMKD, TKDD, TIST, TOIS, and TKDE. Previously, I co-organized several tutorials on user engagement metrics and optimization topics at WWW 2019, WSDM 2018, KDD 2014, and CIKM 2013. More recently, I co-organized workshops on computational jobs marketplace on KDD 2022 and WSDM 2022.
Recent Activities
From 2021, I start to give a series of invited talks on the topic of “Computational Jobs Marketplace” at various venues including:
- Industry Invited Talks: Chinese edition at SDCon 2023 (April 2023), CBA AI Frontiers event (October, 2022), Southern Data Science 2022 (September, 2022), Melbourne Search and Recommendation Group Meetup (November, 2021), The AI Summit | Silicon Valley (November, 2021).
- Academic Conferences Keynote Talks: Decision Making for Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems Workshop at The Web Conference 2023 (April 2023), RecSys in HR 2022 (September 2022)
- University Invited Talks: CS Dept. at Michigan State University (April 2023).
And at the same time, I co-organized two workshops on the same topic:
- The Workshop on Decision Intelligence and Analytics for Online Marketplaces: Jobs, Ridesharing, Retail, and Beyond at KDD 2022.
- The First International Workshop on Computational Jobs Marketplace as part of WSDM 2022.
Recent Papers & Posts
- 2022-08-21 I published a new post about thoughts regarding KDD 2022.
- 2022-08-26 “Remote Work Optimization with Robust Multi-channel Graph Neural Networks” at KDD 2022 Workshop. [LINK]