Yi Zhang
Research & Group
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 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, Applied Math and Statistics Department
Ph.D. and M.S., Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
B.S., Computer Science, Tsinghua University
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
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),
The research in my group is sponsored by:
