Experience and Recommendations on PhD Research at HKUST

Speaker:        Nathan Nan LIU and Dr. Yu ZHANG
                Department of Computer Science and Engineering
                Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Title:          "Experience and Recommendations on PhD Research at HKUST"

Date:           Monday, 28 November 2011

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Many young students are entering PhD programs, but are unsure of what to
expect in their PhD research and the research outcome.  In this talk, we
invite two PhD graduates from our department to share their experience in
PhD research at HKUST.  The first speaker, Nathan Liu, did extensive
research in recommendation technologies in industrial projects, and headed
a joint HKUST-SJTU team to achieve the third place at the prestigious ACM
KDD 2011 competition as well as won a CIKM best paper award.  In this
talk, Nathan will discuss his research topic, research methodology, and
experience in industrial job hunting experience.  The second speaker, Dr.
Yu Zhang, won the prestigious Uncertainty in AI Conference best paper
award in 2010.  Yu will share his experience on theoretical research.
There will be a Q/A period after their talks.


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Biography:

Nathan LIU is PhD candidate in the AI group. His research interests center
around the design of machine learning and data mining algorithms for
recommendation systems. He published more than 10 papers on related topics
and had worked on several industrial research projects. He has led a joint
HKUST-SJTU team to achieve the third place at the prestigious ACM KDD-Cup
competition as well as winning top places at several other world wide data
mining competitions. He also received a best inter-disciplinary paper
award in 2011 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.


Yu ZHANG is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering of The Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology. He received PhD degree from the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering of The Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology in 2011, and the BSc and MEng degrees from the Department of
Computer Science and Technology of Nanjing University in 2004 and 2007
respectively. His research interests mainly include machine learning and
data mining, especially in multi-task learning, transfer learning,
dimensionality reduction, metric learning and semi-supervised learning. He
was the winner of the best paper award in the 26th Conference on
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2010.