Zhang, Yanis a professor in the Department of Machine Intelligence, School of EECS, Peking University. He obtained his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D from Peking University in 1992, 1995 and 2002, respectively. His research interests include intelligent information retrieval, big data processing and web technologies.

Dr. Zhang has published more than 80 research papers, and many of them are published in top-tier conferences and journals, such as SIGIR, KDD, EMNLP, and KBS. He has served in the Technical Program Committee of various international conferences including WWW and IJCNN, and as PC Co-Chair of DMMOOC 2017 and MPR 2016, Area Chair of IJCNN 2013 and IJCNN 2011. He is serving as an Editorial Board Member of Chinese Journal of Data Analysis and Knowledge Discovery.

Dr. Zhang has more than ten research projects including NSFC, 973 program, HGJ project, etc. His research achievements are summarized as follows:

1) Web-based Event Detecting, Tracking and Analyzing: As the web is changing faster and faster, it is more and more difficult to grasp the most popular and desired web information in a timely manner, especially the information for online events. He proposed a framework and a series of methods to detect and track the web events, produce the timeline summarization, and illustrate the evolved route of the whole event.

2) Big Network Data Analysis: Big network data, or large-scale network data, brings great challenge to researchers due to its volume, velocity and value. He proposed new techniques to conduct fast overlapping community detection, community evolution tracking, information diffusion over community, and other tasks. These methods can both improve the performance of related applications and give a further explanation to some phenomena of web evolution.