I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department and Data Science Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). I am also an affiliated researcher at UMass Transportation Center (UMTC). I obtained two Ph.D. degrees, in Computer Science from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2013, and Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2009, respectively. I am interested in analyzing, understanding, and making sense of spatial-temporal big data, smart cities, and urban intelligence. I am a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM and AAAI.
⧫ News
[TPC] 12/2020 TPC for KDD 2021, and ICML 2021.[Paper] 10/2020: Two papers were accepted by IEEE Transactions on Big Data. Congrats to Menghai and Xin.[Paper] 09/2020: Two papers were accepted by NeurIPS 2020. Congratulations to Xin.[Award] 08/2020: $2 million NSF grant from NSF SCC program.[Paper] 08/2020: Six papers were accepted by ICDM 2020 (2), SIGSPATIAL 2020 (3), and CIKM 2020 (1).[TPC] 07/2020 TPC for ICLR 2021, AAAI 2021, SDM 2021, WWW 2021, and Senior PC for IJCAI 2021.[Award] 06/2020: $529k NSF CAREER Award! Thanks, NSF.[Paper] 05/2020: Three papers were accepted by KDD 2020 (Research Track).[Chair] 03/2020 Proceedings Chair for SIGSPATIAL 2020.[TPC] 01/2020 TPC for NeurIPS 2020, KDD 2020, SIGIR 2020, CIKM 2020, and SIGSPATIAL 2020.[Paper] 01/2020: Two papers were accepted by WWW 2020.[Paper] 01/2020: One paper was accepted by Ubicomp 2020 and IMWUT.[Paper] 11/2019: One paper was accepted by TKDE.[TPC] 11/2019 TPC for ICML 2020, IJCAI 2020, ICDM 2020.[Paper] 09/2019: One paper was accepted by TIST.[TPC] 08/2019 TPC for ICLR 2020, AAAI 2020, and SDM 2020.[Paper] 08/2019: Two papers were accepted by TKDE and SIGSPATIAL 2019.[Paper] 08/2019: Congratulations to Xin and Yingxue. Two papers were accepted by ICDM 2019.[Paper] 07/2019: Congratulations to Guojun. Our paper was accepted by CDC 2019.[Best Paper] 04/2019: Our SDM'19 paper won Best Applied Data Science Paper Award (Project Link).[TPC] 04/2019 TPC for ICDM 2019, CIKM 2019, SIGSPATIAL GIS 2019.[Paper] 3/2019: One paper was accepted by TKDE.[Editor] 02/2019: I serve as an associate editor (AE) for ACM TIST. and a guest editor for ACM TDS.[TPC] 01/2019 TPC for IJCAI 2019 and KDD 2019.[Paper] 12/2018: Congratulations to Menghai for our paper being accepted by SDM 2019.[Paper] 10/2018: One paper was accepted by AAAI 2019.[Award] 09/2018: $1.75 million NSF grant from NSF SCC program.[NSF] IIS-1942680, "CAREER: Spatial-Temporal Imitation Learning". 7/2020-6/2025.[NSF] CNS-1952085, "SCC-IRG Track 1: Empowering and Enhancing Workers Through Building A Community-Centered Gig Economy". (Subawarded to WPI), 10/2020-9/2023.[NSF] CMMI-1831140, "SCC: Leveraging Autonomous Shared Vehicles for Greater Community Health, Equity, Livability, and Prosperity (HELP)". (Subawarded to WPI), 9/2018-9/2021.[NSF] CNS-1657350, "CRII: CPS: CityLines: Designing Urban Hub-and-Spoke Transportation System with Data-Driven Cyber-Control", NSF CRII award from CPS program, 8/2017-7/2020.[Industry] DiDi Chuxing Research, "User Behavior Analysis for Ride-Hailing Services", 3/2018-.NeurIPS 2020 - f-GAIL: Learning f-Divergence for Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
NeurIPS 2020 - Adaptive Reduced Rank Regression
- KDD 2020
- xGAIL: Explainable Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Explainable Human Decision Analysis
- KDD 2020
- Curb-GAN: Conditional Urban Traffic Estimation through Spatio-Temporal Generative Adversarial Networks
- KDD 2020
- ST-SiameseNet: Spatio-Temporal Siamese Networks for Human Mobility Signature Identification
- ICDM 2020
- TrajGAIL: Trajectory Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Long-term Decision Analysis
- ICDM 2020
- cST-ML: Continuous Spatial-Temporal Meta-Learning for Traffic Dynamics Prediction
- ICDM 2019
- Unveiling Taxi Drivers’ Strategies via cGAIL - Conditional Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
- ICDM 2019
- TrafficGAN: Off-Deployment Traffic Estimation with Traffic Generative Adversarial Networks
- SDM 2019
(Best Paper Award!) Dissecting the Learning Curve of Taxi Drivers: A Data-Driven Approach- SIGSPATIAL 2020
- Is Reinforcement Learning the Choice of Human Learners? A Case Study of Taxi Drivers
- SIGSPATIAL 2020
- COVID-GAN: Estimating Human Mobility Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic through Spatio-Temporal Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
- SIGSPATIAL 2020
- Cycling-Net: A Deep Learning Approach to Predicting Cyclist Behaviors from Geo-Referenced Egocentric Video Data
- SIGSPATIAL 2019
- Effective Recycling Planning for Dockless Sharing Bikes
⧫ Ongoing Research Projects
(full list of awards/grants.)⧫ Recent Publications
-
(full list of publications, Google Scholar, DBLP)
⧫ Sponsors
Sincere gratitude to our sponsors from NSF, DiDi Chuxing, Pitney Bowes Inc., and NVIDIA.




⧫ Research Interests:

⧫ Recent Professional Service
-
Full list of professional service
- Panelist
- NSF 2017-2020
- Proceedings Chair
- ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020
- Pub Chair
- ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017-18
- TPC
- KDD 2021
- TPC
- ICML 2021
- TPC
- ICLR 2021
- TPC
- AAAI 2021
- SPC
- IJCAI 2021
- TPC
- WWW 2021
- TPC
- SDM 2021
- TPC
- NeurIPS 2020
- TPC
- KDD 2020
- TPC
- SIGSPATIAL 2020
- TPC
- ICDM 2020
- TPC
- SDM 2020
- TPC
- ICML 2020
- TPC
- ICLR 2020
- TPC
- IJCAI 2020
- TPC
- AAAI 2020
- TPC
- SIGIR 2020
- TPC
- CIKM 2020
⧫ Media Coverage
- 5/2017
- Telegram & Gazette News
- 3/2017
- WPI Research News
- 3/2017
- WBJournal Online
⧫ Professional Appointments
- 2015-now
- Assistant Professor, WPI
- 2015
- Postdoc, U of Minnesota
- 2013-14
- Researcher, Noah's Ark Lab, Hong Kong
- 2012
- Research Intern, Bell Lab, NJ
- 2011
- Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Beijing
- 2009-13
- Research Assistant, U of Minnesota
⧫ Education
- Ph.D.
- Computer Science, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, 2013
- Ph.D.
- Electrical Engineering, Beijing U of Posts and Telecommunications, 2009
- MS
- Electrical Engineering, Sichuan University, 2006
- BS
- Electrical Engineering, Sichuan University, 2003