Prof. Hongzhi Yin

Biography

Prof. Hongzhi Yin works as an ARC Future Fellow and Professor and director of the Responsible Big Data Intelligence Lab (RBDI) at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has made notable contributions to predictive analytics, recommendation systems, graph learning, social media analytics, and decentralized and edge intelligence. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his research achievements. He has been named to IEEE Computer Society’s AI’s 10 to Watch 2022 and Field Leader of Data Mining & Analysis in The Australian's Research 2020 magazine.  In addition, he has received the prestigious 2023 Young Tall Poppy Science Awards, Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 2021, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2016, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award 2019, Rising Star of  Science Award (2023 and 2022), AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Data Mining (2024, 2023 and 2022). His research has won 8 international and national Best Paper Awards, including Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention at WSDM 2023, Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, Best Student Paper Award at DASFAA 2020, Best Paper Award Nomination at ICDM 2018, ACM Computing Reviews' 21 Annual Best of Computing Notable Books and Articles, Best Paper Award at ADC 2018 and 2016. His Ph.D. thesis won Peking University Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2014 and CCF Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award (Nomination) 2014. He has ten conference papers recognized as the Most Influential Papers in KDD 2021 and  2013, AAAI 2021, SIGIR 2022, WWW 2023 and 2021, CIKM 2021, 2019, 2016, and 2015. He has published 300 papers with an H-index of 72, including 180+ CCF A and 80+ CCF B, 180+ CORE A* and 80+ CORE A, such as KDD, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, AAAI, IJCAI, ACM Multimedia, ECCV, IEEE TKDE, TNNL, VLDB Journal, and ACM TOIS. He has been the leading author (first/co-first author or corresponding author) for 200+. He has been an SPC/PC member for many top conferences, such as AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, VLDB, ICDE, ICDM, and CIKM. He has been serving as Associate Editor/Guest Editor/Editorial Board for Neural Networks (JCR Q1, Chinese Academy of Sciences ranking Q1,  and CCF B), Science China Information Sciences (JCR Q1, Chinese Academy of Sciences ranking Q1,  and CCF A), Data Science and Engineering (DSE, JCR Q1, Chinese Academy of Sciences ranking Q2), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST, CCF B), Journal of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2022-2023  (TOIS, CCF A), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2020-2021 (TIST, Q1), Information Systems 2020-2021 (CORE A*), and World Wide Web 2020-2021 and 2017-2018 (CORE A, CCF B). Dr. Yin has also been attracting wide media coverage, such as The Australian, Edge Impulse, SBS Radio Interviews, UQ News, Sohu.com, Faculty News of EAIT, IEEE Computer Society, ACM Computing Reviews. 

He leads the Responsible Big Data Intelligence Lab (RBDI), comprising 20 researchers and Ph.D. students. He has supervised 18 Ph.D. students to completion. RBDI Lab has worked on trustworthy data intelligence to turn data into privacy-preserving, robust, explainable, and fair intelligent services in various industries and scenarios, such as recommendation and sales prediction, fraud and misinformation detection, healthcare predictive analytics, sociological analysis, passenger demand prediction and passenger-driver matching, anomaly detection in decentralized smart grid. The team is committed to researching and developing next-generation intelligent systems and algorithms for lightweight on-device predictive analytics, recommendation, and decentralized machine learning on massive and heterogeneous data. 

For Prospective Students 

I am now looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students. The University of Queensland ranks in the top 50 as measured by the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The University also ranks 47 in the QS World University Rankings, 52 in the US News Best Global Universities Rankings, 60 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 55 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities.  Multiple PhD scholarships are available now and please find them below.

• Future Fellowship Scholarships: https://scholarships.uq.edu.au/scholarship/phd-scholarship-decentralised-collaborative-predictive-analytics-personal-smart-devices

• UQ Earmarked Scholarships: https://graduate-school.uq.edu.au/project/decentralised-collaborative-predictive-analytics-personal-smart-devices

Research Interests

• Recommender System and User Modeling

• Graph Mining and Network Embedding

• Decentralized and Federated Learning

• Edge Machine Learning and Applications

• Trustworthy Machine Learning and Applications

• QA, Chatbot and Information Retrieval

• Time Series and Sequence Mining and Prediction

• Spatiotemporal Data Mining

Latest News

1. [24 April 2024] I have been recognized with 2024 Computer Science in Australia Leader Award in Research.com.

2. [26 March 2024] We have three research papers accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A). 

   • Lightweight Embeddings for Graph Collaborative Filtering

   • Poisoning Decentralized Collaborative Recommender System and Its Countermeasures

   • CaseLink: Inductive Graph Learning for Legal Case Retrieval

3. [14 March 2024] I have again been recognized as the 2024 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Data Mining.

4. [10 March 2024] We have 8 research papers accepted by the prestigious conference ICDE 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A), including 4 accepted in the first round and 4 in the second round. 

   • Hide Your Model: A Parameter Transmission-free Federated Recommender System

   • Unraveling the 'Anomaly' in Time Series Anomaly Detection: A Self-supervised Tri-domain Solution

   • Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning for Node Classification

   • BIM: Improving Graph Neural Networks with Balanced Influence Maximization 

   • Accelerating Scalable Graph Neural Network Inference with Node-Adaptive Propagation

   • Graph Condensation for Inductive Node Representation Learning

   • BOURNE: Bootstrapped Self-supervised Learning Framework for Unified Graph Anomaly Detection

   • HeteFedRec: Federated Recommender Systems with Model Heterogeneity

5. [13 February 2024] Congratulations to Dr. Junliang Yu, my Ph.D. graduate, on winning the UQ Graduate School 2023 Dean's Award for Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Theses.

6. [11 February 2024] We have 2 research papers directly accepted in the second round of the prestigious conference ICDE 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A). It's noteworthy that out of over 1000 submissions, only 19 were directly accepted. 

   • Hide Your Model: A Parameter Transmission-free Federated Recommender System

   • Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning for Node Classification

7. [2 February 2024]  We are organizing a special issue, "Cloud-Edge Collaboration for On-Device Recommendation", in the top journal - Science China Information Sciences (CCF Ranking A, CIC Ranking A, CAA Ranking A ), and call for paper is online.  

8. [31 January 2024] Our research paper "Personalized Elastic Embedding Learning for On-Device Recommendation" has been accepted by the top journal TKDE 2024 (CORE A* and CCF A).

9. [24 January 2024] We have five research papers and one tutorial accepted by The Web Conference 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A).

   • On-Device Recommender Systems: A Tutorial on The New-Generation Recommendation Paradigm

   • Towards Personalized Privacy: User-Governed Data Contribution for Federated Recommendation

   • Decentralized Collaborative Learning with Adaptive Reference Data for On-Device POI Recommendation

   • Physical Trajectory Inference Attack and Defense in Decentralized POI Recommendation

   • Prompt-enhanced Federated Content Representation Learning for Cross-domain Recommendation

   • Challenging Low Homophily in Social Recommendation

10. [23 January 2024] We have released three timely surveys:

    • On-Device Recommender Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

    • Graph Condensation: A Survey

    • Poisoning Attacks against Recommender Systems: A Survey

11. [19 January 2024]  I have been invited to serve as Official Nominator for VinFuture Prize (US$3,000,000). The nomination is open!

12. [13 January 2024] I have been invited to serve as Area Chair in the Research Track of KDD 2024. 

13. [1 January 2024] I began to serve as Action/Associate Editor for  Neural Networks (JCR Q1, Chinese Academy of Sciences ranking Q1,  and CCF B), Data Science and Engineering (DSE, JCR Q1, Chinese Academy of Sciences ranking Q2).

14. [1 January 2024] I have been promoted to Professor (Level E) at The University of Queensland. 

15. [17 December 2023] Our tutorial proposal was accepted by The Web Conference 2024, and we will deliver a tutorial "On-Device Recommender Systems: A Tutorial on The New-Generation Recommendation Paradigm". 

16. [8 December 2023] I have been recognized with the 2023 Rising Star of Science Award on Research.com  and ranked 11th in Australia.

17. [1 December 2023] We have four research papers accepted by the top conference ICDE 2024 1st Round (CORE A*, CCF A).

    • Accelerating Scalable Graph Neural Network Inference with Node-Adaptive Propagation

    • Graph Condensation for Inductive Node Representation Learning

    • BOURNE: Bootstrapped Self-supervised Learning Framework for Unified Graph Anomaly Detection

    • HeteFedRec: Federated Recommender Systems with Model Heterogeneity

18. [30 October 2023] Our ARC DP 2024 application, titled "Privacy-Aware and Personalised Explanation Overlays for Recommender Systems", has been granted and funded. 

19. [20 October 2023] We have three research papers accepted as ORAL by the top conference WSDM 2024.

    • Budgeted Embedding Table For Recommender Systems

    • Defense Against Model Extraction Attacks on Recommender Systems 

    • Motif-based Prompt Learning for Universal Cross-domain Recommendation

20. [16 October 2023] Our research paper "Manipulating Visually-aware Federated Recommender Systems and Its Countermeasures" has been accepted by the top journal TOIS (CORE A and CCF A).

21. [1 October 2023] Our research paper "Variational Counterfactual Prediction under Runtime Domain Corruption" has been accepted by the top journal TKDE 2023 (CORE A* and CCF A).

22. [6 September 2023] I was invited to serve as Senior PC for PAKDD 2024 and DASFAA 2024.

23. [6 September 2023] We have two papers accepted by the top conference ICDM 2023 (Acceptance Rate 9.73% for Regular Papers). 

    • Learning Compact Compositional Embeddings via Regularized Pruning for Recommendation

    • To Predict or to Reject: Causal Effect Estimation with Uncertainty on Networked Data

24. [6 August 2023] I am honored to receive AIPS Young Tall Poppy Science Award 2023. 

25. [5 August 2023] We have four research papers accepted by the top conference CIKM 2023.

    • Towards Communication-Efficient Model Updating for On-Device Session-Based Recommendation

    • Semantic-aware Node Synthesis for Imbalanced Heterogeneous Information Networks

    • Self-Supervised Dynamic Hypergraph Recommendation based on Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph

    • Causality-guided Graph Learning for Session-based Recommendation 

26. [24 July 2023] I was invited to serve as an Area Chair (AC) for the User Modeling and Recommendation track of The Web Conference 2024.

27. [24 July 2023] We have two TKDE papers recognized as ESI Highly Cited Papers. 

    • Enhancing Social Recommendation With Adversarial Graph Convolutional Networks - TKDE 2022.

    • Preference-Aware Task Assignment in Spatial Crowdsourcing: From Individuals to Groups - TKDE 2022.

28. [12 July 2023] Our research paper "Comprehensive Privacy Analysis on Federated Recommender System against Attribute Inference Attacks" has been accepted by the top journal TKDE 2023 (CORE A* and CCF A).

29. [22 June 2023] Congratulations to my Ph.D. graduates Dr. Shijie Zhang and Dr. Qinyong Wang on winning UQ Graduate School 2022 and 2021 Dean's Award for Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Theses. 

30. [20 June 2023] Congratulations to my Ph.D. student Dr. Junliang Yu on achieving his Ph.D.  from The University of Queensland. 

31. [19 June 2023] Our research paper "XSimGCL: Towards Extremely Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation" has been accepted by the top journal TKDE 2023 (CORE A* and CCF A).

32. [2 June 2023] Our research paper "Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey" has been accepted by the top journal TKDE 2023 (CORE A* and CCF A).

33. [18 May 2023] I was invited to be an SPC for the top conference CIKM 2023.

34. [17 May 2023] Our research paper "Efficient Bi-Level Optimization for Recommendation Denoising"  was accepted by the top conference KDD 2023 Research Track (CORE A* and CCF A).

35. [4 May 2023]  I am excited to receive the prestigious “AI's 10 to Watch” award from the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Intelligent Systems. 

36. [2 May 2023] Our research paper "KGA: A General Machine Unlearning Framework Based on Knowledge Gap Alignment" was accepted by the top conference ACL 2023 (CCF A and CORE A*).  Congratulations to Lingzhi!

37. [20 April 2023] Our research paper "Imbalanced Node Classification Beyond Homophilic Assumption" was accepted by the top conference IJCAI 2023 (CCF A and CORE A*).  Congratulations to Jie Liu!

38. [10 April 2023] I was invited to give a speech on the public webinar "Application and Future Challenges of ChatGPT "  by the editorial office of Human-Centric Intelligent Systems.

39. [6 April 2023] We have four full research papers accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2023 (CCF A and CORE A*) .  Congratulations to the Ph.D. students Wei Yuan, Jing Long, Yunke Qu, and Shangfei Zheng.  

    • Manipulating Federated Recommender Systems: Poisoning with Synthetic Users and Its Countermeasures

    • Model-Agnostic Decentralized Collaborative Learning for On-Device POI Recommendation

    • Continuous Input Embedding Size Search For Recommender Systems

    • DREAM: Adaptive Reinforcement Learning based on Attention Mechanism for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

40. [8 March 2023] Our research paper "TinyAD: Memory-efficient anomaly detection for time series data in Industrial IoT" has been accepted by the highly impacted journal - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (JCR Q1).  Congratulations to Yuting.

41. [2 March 2023] Our research paper "Knowledge Enhancement for Contrastive Multi-Behavior Recommendation" has won "Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention" at WSDM 2023.

42. [1 March 2023] We organize a special issue on Graph Representation Learning for Feature Extraction and Signal Processing in CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology (JCR Q1), calling for papers. 

43. [18 Feb 2023] Our research work "Heterogeneous Collaborative Learning for Personalized Healthcare Analytics via Messenger Distillation" was accepted by IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI) 2023 (CORE A* and Q1). Congratulations to Guanhua.

44. [15 Feb 2023] Our research work "Time-aware Dynamic Graph Embedding for Asynchronous Structural Evolution" was accepted by TKDE 2023 (CORE A* and CCF A). 

45. [27 January 2023]  I was invited to join the Doctoral Consortium Committee of WSDM 2023 as a Mentor.

46. [26 January 2023] We have 2 research papers accepted by The Web Conference 2023 (CCF A and CORE A*). Congratulations to the first authors Wei Yuan and Liang Qu.

    • Interaction-level Membership Inference Attack Against Federated Recommender Systems

    • Semi-decentralized Federated Ego Graph Learning for Recommendation

47. [9 January 2023] Our research paper "Knowledge Enhancement for Contrastive Multi-Behavior Recommendation" has been shortlisted for the Best Paper Award (BPA) for WSDM 2023,  and there are only four BPA candidate papers.

48. [6 January 2023] Our research paper "Efficient On-Device Session-Based Recommendation" was accepted by the top journal  ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS, CCF A, CORE A).

49. [3 January 2023] Our social computing work "Self-supervised Hypergraph Representation Learning for Sociological Analysis" was accepted by the top journal TKDE (CORE A* and CCF A).

50. [30 December 2022] Our survey paper "AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey" was accepted by the top journal  ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS, CCF A, CORE A).

51. [23 December 2022] I was invited to serve as PC for the top conference SIGIR 2023,  KDD 2023,  and IJCAI 2023.

52. [30 November 2022] I was awarded Faculty Teaching and Learning Awards (EAIT Citation for Excellence in Student Learning).

53. [22 November 2022] I was invited to serve as a senior PC (meta reviewer) for the top conference  PAKDD2023 (CORE A).

54. [15 November 2022] I have been recognized with the 2022 Rising Star of Science Award and ranked 28 in Australia on Research.com.

55. [13 November 2022]  I was invited to serve as a senior PC (meta reviewer) and proceeding chair for DASFAA 2023 (CCF B).

56. [11 November 2022] Our group's github has been launched https://github.com/AIHub-UQ.

57. [1 November 2022] Our research paper "Structure Learning via Meta-Hyperedge for  Dynamic Rumor Detection" was accepted by the top journal TKDE (CORE A* and CCF A).

58. [18 October 2022] We have 4 joint research papers (collaborated with Alibaba, Tencent, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, UTS) accepted by the top conference WSDM 2022 (CORE A*).

    • Federated Unlearning for On-Device Recommendation 

    • Knowledge Enhancement for Contrastive Multi-Behavior Recommendation 

    • Learning to Distill Graph Neural Networks 

    • Simplifying Graph-based Collaborative Filtering for Recommendation

59. [14 October 2022] I was shortlisted for the 2022 University of Queensland Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

60. [10 October 2022] I was invited to serve as an area chair in the Industry and Application Track program committee for ICDE 2023 (CORE A* and CCF A).

61. [1 October 2022] I was invited to deliver a keynote at The 9th International Conference on Behavioral and Social Computing (BESC 2022).

62. [6 September 2022]  I received "Most Effective Teacher Nomination of EAIT Faculty" for my teaching INFS7450 Social Media Analytics.

63. [1 September 2022] We have two research papers on knowledge graph reasoning accepted by ICDE 2023 (CCF A, CORE A*) and one research paper on sequential recommendation systems accepted by ICDM 2022 (CCF B, CORE A).

    • Beyond Double Ascent via Recurrent Neural Tangent Kernel in Sequential Recommendation, ICDM 2022.

    • MMKGR: Multi-hop Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Reasoning, ICDE 2023.

    • Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction, ICDE 2023.

64. [22 August 2022] Our work "Time Interval-enhanced Graph Neural Network for Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation" was accepted by the top journal TNNLs (CORE A*, Q1 with IF 14.26). 

65. [17 August 2022] Our work "Self-supervised Graph Learning for Occasional Group Recommendation" was accepted by International Journal of Intelligent Systems (Q1 with IF 8.993)

66. [8 August 2022] Congratulations to three new PhD holders Shijie Zhang, Xuhui Ren and Mubashir Imran on successfully passing their PhD thesis defences, and receiving competitive job offers from Tencent, Intel and Amazon respectively.

67. [29 July 2022] We have two papers on federated and decentralized recommendation systems accepted by the top journal ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS, CCF A, CORE A).

    • Decentralized Collaborative Learning Framework for Next POI Recommendation

    • ReFRS: Resource-efficient Federated Recommender System for Dynamic and Diversified User Preferences 

68. [4 July 2022] Our work "Switchable Online Knowledge Distillation" was accepted by the top conference ECCV 2022 (CORE A*).

69. [19 June 2022] Our work "Reinforcement Learning-enhanced Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation" was  accepted by the top journal TKDE (CCF A, CORE A*). 

70. [20 May 2022] Our work "A Multi-Strategy based Pre-Training Method for Cold-Start Recommendation" was accepted by the top journal ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS, CCF A, CORE A).

71. [20 May 2022] Our work "CIRCLE: Continual Repair across Programming Languages " was accepted by The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis 2022 (ISSTA, CCF A, CORE A).

72. [31 March 2022] We have 4 full research papers on recommender systems accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2022 (CORE A* and CCF A). Congratulations to Junliang, Rocky, Xin and Liang.  Here are the papers:

    • "Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive by Learning for Recommendation"

    •  "Thinking inside The Box: Learning Hypercube Representations for Group Recommendation"

    •  "On-Device Next-Item Recommendation with Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation" 

    •   "Single-shot Embedding Dimension Search in Recommender System"

73. [31 March 2022] We just release two survey papers on recommender systems on arXiv: Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey and AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey. 

74. [15 March 2022] I was recognized as the 2022 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars by AMiner. 

75. [14 February 2022] We organize a special issue "Trustworthy Recommendation and Search" in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), and call for paper is beginning. 

76. [14 January 2022] We have two papers "ClusterSCL: Cluster-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning on Graphs" and "Unified Question Generation with Continual Lifelong Learning" accepted by the top conference Web Conference 2022 (WWW'22, CORE A* and CCF A).

77. [8 January 2022]  Our work "DeHIN: A Decentralized Framework for Embedding Large-scale Heterogeneous Information Networks" was accepted by the top journal TKDE (CCF A, CORE A*). 

78. [3 January 2022] As the first research output of my Future Fellow Project,  our work "Personalized On-Device E-health Analytics with Decentralized Block Coordinate Descent" was accepted by the CORE A* journal IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.