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.

• Recommender systems
• Social computing, social network analysis
• Information retrieval
• Algorithmic game theory
• Multi-armed bandits
• Probabilistic graphical models

• 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.

• 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

• Visiting Student at Stanford. 05.2014-06.2014

Supervisor: Prof. Julian McAuley and Prof. 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. 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.

Applied Scientist, Core Machine Learning Team, Amazon, Seattle, WA, U.S.

Rm 1024, Ho Sin-Hang Engineering Building,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
CUHK, N.T., Hong Kong
Email: tzhao@cse.cuhk.edu.hk