Yanhua Li

yanhua li

I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department and Data Science Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). 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.

Call For Papers The 9th SIGKDD International Workshop on Urban Computing, in conjunction with the 26th ACM SIGKDD 2020, due on ~~May 20, 2020~~ June 3, 2020. (details).

Openings I am looking for self-motivated PhD students and visiting scholars to work with me on the exciting area of urban intelligence. I'm particularly interested in candidates with background in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Math, and strong programming skill. Please send me a short email with your C.V. and anything you believe relevant! For PhD program applicants, here is the admission page at WPI.

⧫ News

[Award] 08/2020: $2 million NSF grant from NSF SCC program.
[TPC] 07/2020 TPC for ICLR 2021, AAAI 2021, SDM 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.

⧫ Ongoing Research Projects

full list of awards/grants

[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-.

⧫ Recent Publications

SDM 2019: (Best Paper Award!) Dissecting the Learning Curve of Taxi Drivers: A Data-Driven Approach
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
KDD 2018: Detecting Illegal Vehicle Parking Events using Sharing Bikes' Trajectories
KDD 2017: Planning Bike Paths based on Sharing-Bikes' Trajectories
WWW 2020: Inferring Passengers’ Interactive Choices on Public Transits via MA-AL: Multi-Agent Apprenticeship Learning
WWW 2020: What is the Human Mobility in a New City? - Transfer Mobility Knowledge Across Cities
AAAI 2019: Predicting Urban Dispersal Events: A Two-Stage Framework through Deep Survival Analysis on Mobility Data
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
ICDM 2018: Human-Centric Urban Transit Evaluation and Planning
ICDM 2016: The Optimal Distribution of Electric-Vehicle Chargers across A City
ICDM 2015: Dissecting Regional Weather-Traffic Sensitivity throughout a City
SIGSPATIAL 2019: Effective Recycling Planning for Dockless Sharing Bikes
SIGSPATIAL 2017: CityLines: Hybrid Hub-and-Spoke Urban Transit System
SIGSPATIAL 2017: Forecasting Gathering Events through Continuous Destination Prediction on Big Trajectory Data
SIGSPATIAL 2017: Querying Massive Trajectories by Path on the Cloud
IEEE TKDE 2019: Mining Spatio-temporal Reachable Regions with Multiple Sources from Massive Trajectory Data
IEEE TKDE 2019: Forecasting Gathering Events through Trajectory Destination Prediction: a Dynamic Hybrid Model
IEEE TKDE 2019: Interactive Bike Lane Planning using Sharing Bikes’ Trajectories
IEEE TKDE 2018: User Preference Analysis for Most Frequent Peer/Dominator
IEEE TKDE 2017: TaxiRec: Recommending Road Clusters to Taxi Drivers Using Ranking-based Extreme Learning Machines
ACM TIST 2019: DHPA: Dynamic Human Preference Analytics Framework -- A Case Study on Taxi Drivers' Learning Curve Analysis
IEEE TBD 2018: CityLines: Designing Hybrid Hub-and-Spoke Transit System with Urban Big Data
IEEE TBD 2018: Efficient Path Query Processing over Massive Trajectories on the Cloud
IEEE TBD 2018: Sampling Big Trajectory Data for Traversal Trajectory Aggregate Query
IEEE TBD 2017: Mining the Most Influential k-Location Set From Massive Trajectories
IEEE TBD 2017: Detecting and Analyzing Urban Regions with High Impact of Weather Change on Transport
IEEE TBD 2017: Scalable User-Substation Assignment with Big Data from Power Grids
Ubicomp 2020: Dynamic Public Resource Allocation based on Human Mobility Prediction
CDC 2019: Transforming Policy via Reward Advancement
CDC 2017: Data-driven inverse learning of passenger preferences in urban public transits
RTSS 2017: REC: Predictable Charging Scheduling for Electric Taxi Fleets
e-Energy 2016: Shepherd: Sharing Energy for Privacy Preserving in Hybrid AC-DC Microgrids

⧫ Sponsors

Sincere gratitude to our sponsors from NSF, DiDi Chuxing, Pitney Bowes Inc., and NVIDIA.

⧫ Research Interests:

⧫ Recent Professional Service

Panelist: NSF 2017-2020
Proceedings Chair: ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020
Pub Chair: ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017-18
TPC: ICLR 2021
TPC: AAAI 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