Jiliang Tang presents 2022 J.K. Aggarwal Prize Lecture
Jiliang Tang of Michigan State University presented the 2022 J.K. Aggarwal Prize Lecture, hosted by the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) this summer in Montréal, Québec. The recipient is a scientist under the age of 40, whose contributions and research have had a major impact on the field.
Tang is a newly appointed MSU Foundation Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, who has won multiple recognitions in recent years for his work in data mining and machine learning.
“I was very honored to be selected for this international honor,” Tang said. “I was able to introduce a novel perspective to understand and unify existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). They have shown their power in graph representation learning, especially in biology and healthcare. We talked about ways to build trustworthy GNNs, which is important because graphs now denote data in real-world systems.” he added.
Abdol Esfahanian, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, called Tang one of the College of Engineering’s youngest rising stars.
“He burst through the academic levels – from assistant professor to associate, full and now the select MSU Foundation Professor title -- in just three years. Jiliang is a phenomenal researcher – and is internationally respected as judged by the series of top awards he has received so early in his career.”
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.
He creates computational methods to advance critical interdisciplinary applications. He also designs 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 57 of his papers have been cited more than 100 times each, with an h-index of 74 and an aggregate of over 24,000 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 named the 2021 Rising Starby the Association of Chinese Scholars in Computing. He also was the 2020 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 was awarded 2022 SIAM/IBM Early Career Research Award, 2021 IEEE ICDM Tao Li Award, 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.