====== Tong ZHAO ====== I'm a PhD candidate in CSE department at CUHK, advised by Prof. Irwin King. I'm broadly interested in machine learning, data mining, social computing and recommender systems. ==== Research Interests ==== * Recommender systems * Social computing, social network analysis * Information retrieval * Algorithmic game theory * Multi-armed bandits * Probabilistic graphical models ==== Conference Publications ==== *Shenglin Zhao, Tong Zhao, Irwin King, Michael R Lyu. Geo-Teaser: Geo-Temporal Sequential Embedding Rank for Point-of-interest Recommendation. In WWW Companion, 2017. *Tong Zhao, Irwin King. Constructing Reliable Gradient Exploration for Online Learning to Rank. In CIKM, 2016 (Best Student Paper Runner-up (Top 2 over 270 accepted papers, 0.7%)) *Tong Zhao, H. Vicky Zhao, Irwin King. Exploiting Game Theoretic Analysis for Link Recommendation in Social Network. In CIKM 2015. *Tong Zhao, Julian McAuley, Irwin King. Improving Latent Factor Models Via Personalized Feature Projection for One Class Recommendation. In CIKM 2015. *Tong Zhao, Julian McAuley, Irwin King. Leveraging Social Connections to Improve Personalized Ranking for Collaborative Filtering. In CIKM 2014. *Tong Zhao, Junjie Hu, Pinjia He, Hang Fan, Michael Lyu and Irwin King. Exploiting Homophily-based Implicit Social Network to Improve Recommendation Performance. In IJCNN 2014. *Tong Zhao, Chunping Li, Mengya Li. Social Recommendation Incorporating Topic Mining and Social Trust Analysis. In CIKM 2013. *Tong Zhao, Naiwen Bian, Chunping Li, Mengya Li. Topic-level Expert Modeling in CQA System. In SDM 2013. *Tong Zhao, Chunping Li, Mengya Li. Wikipedia-based Efficient Sampling Approach for Topic model. In International Network Conference, 2012. *Tong Zhao, Chunping Li, Qiang Ding, Li Li. User-Sentiment Topic Model：Refining User’s Topics with Sentiment Information. In SIGKDD workshop on Mining Data Semantics in Information Networks, 2012. *Tong Zhao, Chunping Li, Mengya Li, Siyang Wang. Predicting Best Responder in Community Question Answering using Topic Model Method. In the 2012 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence. ==== Awards & Grants ==== *Best Student Paper Runner-up, CIKM, 2016 *Postgraduate Studentship, The Chinese University of Hong Kong 2013-present *National Scholarship for Postgraduate/Graduate students, Tsinghua University 2011 – 2012 *RIM Research Special Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2011 – 2012 *Software Student Research Training Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2011 – 2012 ==== Research Experience ==== *Visiting Student at Stanford. 05.2014-06.2014 Supervisor: Prof. [[http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~jmcauley/|Julian McAuley]] and Prof. [[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/|Jure Leskovec]]. Research on incorporating social network information into one-class recommendation methods. *Research Intern at Big Data Lab, Baidu Inc. 07.2014-09.2014 Supervisor: Prof. [[http://www.stat.rutgers.edu/home/tzhang/|Tong Zhang]] and Dr. Fen Xia. Research on Bandit problems (contextual bandit for Link Unit recommendation, convex bandit optimization for parameter tuning) dealing with big data (several TB) using Hadoop. ==== Working Experience==== Applied Scientist, Core Machine Learning Team, Amazon, Seattle, WA, U.S.\\ ==== Contact Information ==== Rm 1024, Ho Sin-Hang Engineering Building, \\ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, \\ CUHK, N.T., Hong Kong\\ Email: \\