Jiliang Tang of Michigan State University has received the 2022 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) IBM Early Career Research Award for Excellence in Data Analytics. The award recognizes one individual for outstanding, influential, and lasting contributions in the field of data analysis who is within 10 years of having received their Ph.D.
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 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 should be noted that the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), and Service Integration and Management (SIAM) International Conference on Data Mining (SDM22) are top venues in the Data Mining and Data Analytics, and as far as I can tell, Dr. Tang is the first one who has received all three awards, namely, 2020 SIGKDD Rising Star, 2021 ICDM Tao Li Award, and 2022 SIAM/IBM Early Career Research Award,” Esfahanian added.
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 46 of his papers have been cited more than 100 times each, with an h-index of 69 and an aggregate of over 21,000 citations.
His Ph.D. students are also finding academic career success at institutions including North Carolina State, 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.