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Sept. 17, 2021

Jiliang Tang named Rising Star

Spartan awarded international honor by Chinese Scholars in Computing

Jiliang Tang of Michigan State University has been named the 2021 Rising Star by the Association of Chinese Scholars in Computing - the sole recipient of the international honor this year.

Jiliang Tang

Tang is an associate professor of computer science and engineering (CSE).

Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian, professor and chairperson of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said he is delighted that a Spartan Engineer is the only one named to this significant recognition for 2021.

"This award is presented to an individual who has made outstanding contributions in an area of computing as an early career investigator. Jiliang is considered one of the most outstanding scientists in his specialized field," Esfahanian said. "He continues to bring recognition and honor to our department and our university." 

The newest Rising Star award follows several recognitions presented to Tang since arriving at MSU in 2016.

Last year, he was named a2020 Rising Star in the international field of data mining and data science -- the inaugural recipient of the honor from 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.

He is the director of MSU's Data Science and Engineering (DSE) Lab.The lab focuses on data mining and machine learning, especially on graphs and its applications in various domains such as on social media, biology and education. 

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 40 of his papers have been cited more than 100 times each, with an h-index of 62 and an aggregate of over 17,000 citations.

His Ph.D. students are also finding academic career success at institutions including Vanderbilt University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, the City University of Hong Kong, Utah State University and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Among his other honors, he was awarded the 2021 IEEE Big Data Security Junior Research Award and the MSU College of Engineering 2020 Withrow Distinguished Scholar - Junior ScholarAward. 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.

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