Biography

I am a Professor in The University of Queensland and an ARC Future Fellow. 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 interested in data lake management and governance, particularly in the areas of Data4AI, Data4DeepResearch, and AI4DataSystem.

In Data4AI, I focus on building data agent tools that are able to automate the process of identifying multi-source, heterogeneous 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.

In Data4DeepResearch, I launched the Scholarly Data Management project, where we have deployed a suite of tools: AgenticScholar for research exploration, TaxoConf for Automated Conference Program Generation with Interactive Data Insights (promptly deployed in SIGIR’26, VLDB’26, IJCNN’26), TaxoBase for fine-grained taxonomy mainteance over evolving scholarly data, and TaxoReview for topic-coherent paper-review assignment and panel expansion in the wild. My goal is to address the above long-standing pain points in cross-disciplinary, large-scale conference/journal management.

In AI4DataSystem, 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, 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 one of the eight members of international conference ranking management committee, ICORE. I have been the PC Co-chair of numerous premium venues in the fields of data science, such as ACM CIKM’24. I have been the Associate Editor of PVLDB and SIGMOD and had the honor to be recognized with the Distinguished Associate Editor Award every time. 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.

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 uq/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.