Jiliang Tang of Michigan State University received the Tao Li Award, the sole recipient of the annual honor at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2021.
Tang is an award-winning associate professor of computer science and engineering (CSE), who has won multiple recognitions in recent years for his work in data mining and machine learning.
Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian, professor and chairperson of the CSE Department, said the ICDM award recognizes excellence in early career researchers who received their doctoral degree less than 10 years ago in the field of data mining and machine learning. It is named for Professor Tao Li who propelled early research in data mining.
"Dr. Tang is a world-class researcher. We are proud of his accomplishments and the recognition he brings to the department, college, and the university," Esfahanian added.
This honor follows several international recognitions for Tang in recent years.
He was named the 2021 Rising Starby the Association of Chinese Scholars in Computing - the sole recipient of the international honor this year.
He also 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.
Tang 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 43 of his papers have been cited more than 100 times each, with an h-index of 65 and an aggregate of over 18,000 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 Scholar Award. 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.
He joined MSU in 2016.
The Tao Li Award winners are:
- 2021: Jiliang Tang, MSU, Ph.D. in May 2015, Citations (h-index): 18,500+ (h-65)*
- 2020: Jing Gao, Purdue University, Ph.D. in Dec. 2011, Citations (h-index): 9,700 (h-51)*
- 2019: Hanghang Tong, University of Illinois-Champaign, Ph.D. in Dec. 2009, Citations (h-index): 10,000+ (h-44)*
- 2018: Jilles Vreeken, Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany, Ph.D. in Dec. 2009, Citations (h-index): 2,700 (h-28)*
* Citations and h-index are based on the time of application (not the current).