Biography

I lead the Big Data and Database Group. I am also an Honorary Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne. I obtained my PhD in computer science from National University of Singapore and was the winner of the Best PhD Thesis Award.

I am generally interested in data (lake) management and governance, particularly in the areas of DB4AI and AI4DB. On the DB4AI side, I focus on identifying suitable datasets, discovering hidden relationships among datasets, addressing various data quality challenges (like missing value imputation and mismatch resolution), and assembling them to fulfill diverse user requirements within specified constraints. My goal is to contribute to the development of next-generation data marketplaces and enhance the cost-effectiveness of downstream machine learning tasks. On the AI4DB side, I explore how machine learning techniques can optimize core database operations on both low-dimensional and high-dimensional data, including index selection, learned indexes, query optimization, and cardinality estimation. Talking about the data types in the above problems, I focus on multi-source and multi-modal data in the context of data lakes.

In the past, I proposed the topic of Civil Computing with the mission of using data-driven techniques to improve every individual citizen’s daily life where three typical beneficial domains are House Seeking, Site Selection and Transportation Planning, and a brief summary of highlighted work can be found in a SIGMOD blog.

I am passionate in solving pressing real-world problems, from which I extract and formalize fundamental research questions, propose theoretically sound and practically feasible-to-deploy solutions. On top of that, I have been developing a range of human-in-the-loop data exploration tools to bring big data back to a human scale, to make big data empower everyone for optimal decision making.

I am honored to receive several research awards, such as the Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) in 2021, the Google Faculty Research Awards, the Best Paper Award Runner-up at KDD’19, and the Best Paper Award Nomination at KDD’18.

I am the PC Co-chair of full research paper track at CIKM’24 and ADC’23. I have been the Associate Editor of PVLDB’21, SIGMOD’23 and PVLDB’23 and had the honor to be recognized with the Distinguished Associate Editor Award for each of them. I have served the Area Chair or Senior TPC of flagship conferences in the broad field of data science such as KDD and WSDM. I have been a committee member in the conference ranking process for CORE 2023. I have regularly provided consultancy services to both industrial enterprises and governmental offices, such as City of Melbourne on its Smart City Project and Victoria Department of Human Health and Services on its data quality project.

In the past, I was the co-director of the RMIT Center of Information Discovery and Data Analytics (2021-2023) during which I have fostered an inter-disciplinary collaboration culture, the director of RMIT Master of Data Science Program (2018-2019). Under my leadership, we have created a novel form of data science postgraduate project to support diverse sectors and disciplines within RMIT and put cross-disciplinary collaboration into practice, resulting in a double-win – students are ready to work through those real-life data science projects; people outside DS but have strong Data Analysis needs get their problem solved. I also co-created the RMIT-MIT micro-credential program in data science, bringing novel pathways for students, where RMIT is the first university in Australia having this connected pathway for data science education. I was the HDR Committee Chair (2020-2021) during which I have fostered an excellence-driven, diversified and inclusive research culture.

I am always looking for students who are of high integrity, highly motivated, self-disciplined and consistent, to work with me. If you are the one, please contact me (firstname.lastname AT rmit/unimelb dot edu dot au).

I am energized by playing team sports with dynamic physical competition to cultivate my mental resilience and teamwork skills, and basketball has consistently remained my number one option till 2024.