Yi Zhang

Jack Baskin Professor, Computer Science and Engineering

About: Professor Yi Zhang is a Professor in School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests are personalized search and recommendation, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining and computational economics. She has received various awards, including ACM SIGIR Test Time Award, SIGIR Best Paper Award, National Science Foundation Faculty Career Award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, Google Research Award, Microsoft Research Award, and IBM Research Fellowship. She has served as program chair, area chair and PC member for various top tier conferences. She was an associate editor for ACM Transaction on Information Systems. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. and M.S. from School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and her B.S. from Tsinghua University.

Yi Zhang is also a co-founder of Rul.ai, a low/no code omni channel conversational AI platform. She has been a consultant or technical adviser for several large companies (Alibaba, HP, Toyota, etc.) and startups.

Affiliations: Computer Science and Engineering Department, Economics Department

Ph.D. and M.S., Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

B.S., Computer Science, Tsinghua University

Awards and Honors

Winner of NeurIPS 2025 MMU-RAG Competition (Massive Multi-Modal User-Centric Retrieval Augmented Generation Benchmark)
Elected Vice Chair of the ACM SIGIR Executive Committee
Test of Time Award, ACM SIGIR 2024
National Science Foundation Faculty Career Award
Microsoft Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award
Ranked #1 for the first several months in Netflix Prize
Google Faculty Research Award
IBM Fellowship
Best Paper Award, ACM SIGIR

Research Projects

Multimodal and Knowledge Based Question Answering & Dialog Systems

Conversational Search and Recommendations

National Science Foundation Award: Economics Analysis of Recommender Systems

National Science Foundation Award: Detecting and Tracking Cyber Bullying on the Social Web (4 I's of Social Marketing and Advertising)

National Science Foundation CAREER Award: Future of Search: Personalization, Social Networks and Language (Intro: Getting to know you)

US Department of Education Grant: Explicit Scaffolding for Word Learning in Context through Multimedia Multilingual Word Annotation

Air Force Research Young Investigator Research Award: Adaptive Information Filtering

National Science Foundation Award: Proactive Personalized Information Integration and Retrieval

Professional Activities

General Chair, the 50th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Silicon Valley, 2027

Co Chief Editor, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval

Program co-Chair, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2024, Washington DC

Tutorial Chair, ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 2023, Singapore

Area Chair for Virtual Assistants, Conversational Interactions, and Personalized Human-robot Interaction track, UMAP Conference 2023, Limassol, Cyprus

Co-chair, the ACM SIGIR International Workshop on Explainable Recommendation and Search, 2018,2019,2020

General Co-Chair, ACM ICTIR, Santa Clara, 2019

Knowledge Management Workshop at University of California Santa Cruz, 2011

Organizer for Women in ML at Machine Learning Summer School, Santa Cruz

Chair for Doctoral Consortium at ACM RecSys 2013

Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Information Systems

Area Chair, ACM SIGIR 2012, CIKM 2012, ICWSM 2012, EMNLP 2010, AIR 2010

Workshop co-Chair, Information Retrieval and Advertising Workshop @ ACM SIGIR Conference, 2009

Program co-Chair (IR), ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008),