Jiliang Tang, assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, has been named a "Rising Star" in the international field of data mining and data science.
He will be honored with a first-time award at KDD 2020, the professional conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) in Knowledge, Discovery, and Data Mining (KDD) - considered the premier interdisciplinary assembly in the field of data mining. The virtual conference is from Aug. 23-27.
Tang is being recognized for his research into feature learning, especially on graphs and its applications on the internet and social media domains.
Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian, chairperson of the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said ACM SIGKDD is widely considered the most influential forum in KDD research.
"KDD established the Rising Star Award to celebrate an individual's work in the first five years after earning a PhD. It is a Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates the accomplishments of KDD researchers at the beginning of their careers," he explained.
"Dr. Tang is among the most outstanding scientists in his specialized field," Esfahanian added. "He brings recognition and honor to our department and our university."
Tang is the director of MSU's Data Science and Engineering (DSE) Lab.The lab focuses on developing mining, learning and optimization algorithms to glean actionable patterns from data especially dynamic, multi-dimensional, attributed, signed and high-order graphs that have become universal representations of complex data.
His scholarly efforts are building computational methods to advance critical interdisciplinary applications. He is also designing systems and tools to enable data analytics for researchers who are unable to extract needed information for their work. His research contributions are seminal, exploring new ideas or directions in the field, and are therefore widely cited by other researchers. More than 30 of his papers have been cited more than 100 times each, with an h-index of 52 and an aggregate of over 12,000 citations. His first PhD student Tyler Derr just joined the computer science department of Vanderbilt University as an assistant professor.
Among his other honors, he was awarded the Withrow Distinguished Scholar - Junior Scholar Award by the MSU College of Engineering in spring 2020. Additionally, he received a $507,700 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in spring 2019 and is working to improve the performance of network analytical tools.
Tang is sharing the first ACM SIGKDD Rising Star Award with Danai Koutra, the Morris Wellman assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan.