Biography

I co-direct the RMIT Center of Information Discovery and Data Analytics and the lead the Big Data and Database Group in the Centre. 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 big data management and mining, with a focus on relational data, geo-spatial data and graph data. Currently, my group is working on query optimization in database systems, data quality for ML, data/query pricing, and ML-enhanced algorithms. 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.

I am passionate in solving these real-world problems, from which I extract and formalize fundamental research questions, propose theoretically sound and practically feasible-to-deploy solutions. The showcase videos of my group’s projects are in our Youtube Channel. On top of that, I have been developing a range of human-in-the-loop data exploration systems 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 2020, Two-time Google Faculty Research Award, the Best Paper Award Runner-up at KDD’19, and the Best Paper Award Nomination at KDD’18.

I am the Associate Editor of SIGMOD’23 and PVLDB’23. I have been the Associate Editor of PVLDB’21. I regularly serve the Senior TPC of flagship conferences in the broad field of data science such as KDD and WSDM. I do consulting services for industy and government 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 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 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@rmit/unimelb.edu.au). Four PhD scholarships are available until filled.