Alumni

We are proud of our alumni (listed below in reverse chronological order), who have grown with us and made significant contributions to our research group. Wishing them great success with their careers.

Dr. Lee Ween Jiann

- PhD (defended in Jun 2024)
- Dissertation Title: "Incorporating Intrinsic Structures into Entity Matching and Representation Learning"
- Publications with the group: ICDM-21, TKDE-23, TSAS-24
- Awards:
  - 2023 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
- Employment:
  - Since Jul 2024: ST Engineering

Dr. Chia Chong Cher

- PhD (defended in Nov 2023)
- Dissertation Title: "Effective and Efficient Semantic Representations and Their Applications"
- Publications with the group: ACL-18, WI-IAT-22 , DEXA-23
- Employment:
  - Since Jan 2024: Senior Research Associate, SMU Centre for Computational Law

Dr. Zhang Ce, Delvin

- PhD (defended in May 2023)
- Dissertation Title: "Document Graph Representation Learning"
- Publications with the group: AAAI-20, ECML/PKDD-21, ECML/PKDD-21, CIKM-21, ICML-22, KDD-22, NeurIPS-22, KDD-23, TKDE-23
- Awards:
  - 2022 Dean's List of School of Computing and Information Systems
  - 2021 Singapore Data Science Consortium (SDSC) Dissertation Research Fellowship
  - 2020 & 2022 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
- Employment:
  - Since Sep 2023: Postdoc, Yale University

Dr. Le Trung Hoang

- PhD (defended in Nov 2022)
- Dissertation Title: "Mining Product Textual Data for Recommendation Explanations"
- Publications with the group: IJCAI-20, WSDM-21, BigData-22, WebConf-23 Tutorial, ECIR-24, EDBT-25
- Awards:
  - IJCAI-20 Distinguished Paper Award
  - 2020 Singapore Data Science Consortium (SDSC) Dissertation Research Fellowship
  - 2020 & 2021 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
- Employment:
  - Since Mar 2023: Research Scientist, Preferred.AI, Singapore

Dr. Truong Quoc Tuan

- PhD (defended in Feb 2022)
- Dissertation Title: "Modeling Sentiments and Preferences from Multi-Modal Data"
- Publications with the group: MM-17, AAAI-19, WebConf-19, JMLR-20, MM-20, WSDM-21, ECIR-21, Internet Computing-21, Machine Learning-21, RecSys-21 Tutorial, TheWebConf-22, TheWebConf-23 Tutorial, WSDM-23. TheWebConf-24 Demo
- Awards:
  - 2021 Dean's List of School of Computing and Information Systems
  - 2019 & 2020 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
- Employment:
  - Since Jul 2022: Applied Scientist at Amazon

Dr. Aghiles Salah

- Research Scientist (Jun 2017 to Jan 2021)
- Publications with the group: IJCAI-18, UAI-18, JMLR-20, WSDM-21, Internet Computing-21, RecSys-21, RecSys-21 Tutorial
- Employment:
  - Since Jan 2021: Applied Research Scientist, Rakuten Institute of Technology, Paris, France

Dr. Le Duy Dung, Andrew

- PhD (defended in Sep 2019), Research Scientist (till Jan 2021)
- Dissertation title: "Preference Learning and Similarity Learning Perspectives on Personalized Recommendation"
- Publications with the group: SDM-16, CIKM-17, CIKM-18, IJCAI-19, AAAI-20, JAIR-21, WSDM-22
- Awards:
  - 2018 & 2019 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
  - 2018 & 2019 SMU PhD Student Life Award
- Employment:
  - Since Aug 2021: Assistant Professor in Computer Science, VinUniversity, Vietnam
  - Jun - Jul 2021: AI Scientist, FPT AI Lab in Hanoi, Vietnam
  - Jan - May 2021: Senior Data Scientist in Ads and Personalization Team, Grab Holdings Inc., Singapore

Dr. Le Duc Trong

- PhD (defended in Apr 2019)
- Dissertation title: "Modeling Sequential and Basket-Oriented Associations for Top-K Recommendation"
- Publications with the group: ECMLPKDD-16, IJCAI-17, IJCAI-18, IJCAI-19
- Employment:
  - Since Aug 2019: Lecturer, VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

Dr. Maksim Tkachenko

- PhD (defended in Nov 2018)
- Dissertation title: "Comparison Mining from Text"
- Publications with the group: CIKM-14, ACL-15, CIKM-16, TKDE-17, ACL-18, AAAI-19, ICDM-21 (short), WI-IAT-22, DEXA-23, TKDE-23
- Awards: 2017 & 2018 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
- Employment:
  - From Sep 2022 onwards: Research Scientist at Rakuten Institute of Technology, Singapore
  - May 2021 to Aug 2022: Data Science & Operations Research Advisor at FedEx Asia Pacific, Singapore
  - Dec 2018 - May 2021: Research Scientist, Preferred.AI, Singapore

Dr. Nguyen Thanh Son

- PhD (defended in May 2018)
- Dissertation title: "Entity Summarization of Reviews and Micro-Reviews"
- Publications with the group: CIKM-13, WSDM-15, TKDE-15, DAMI-17
- Awards: 2015 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellow
- Internships:
  - Carnegie Mellon University
  - IBM Research, Dublin, Ireland
- Employment:
  - Since Aug 2018: Research Scientist, A*STAR - Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore

Dr. Do Ha Loc

- PhD (defended in Jun 2017)
- Dissertation title: "Mining Diverse Consumer Preferences for Bundling and Recommendation"
- Publications with the group: WWW-14, PVLDB-15, TOIS-16
- Internship: Carnegie Mellon University
- Employment:
  - Since 2018: Algorithm Engineer, Alibaba, Hangzhou, China
  - 2017: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Hong Kong

Nguyen Tiep Trong

- MPhil (defended in May 2017)
- Dissertation title: "Community-Based Collaborative Learning for Personalized Recommendation"
- Publications with the group: CIKM-14 (short), RecSys-16 (full), CIKM-17 (short)
- Employment:
  - Since Mar 2020: AI Engineer with Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A²I²), Australia
  - Sep 2018 - Mar 2020: Data Scientist, Shopee, Singapore
  - Jul 2017 - Aug 2018: Machine Learning Engineer, ReFUEL4, Singapore

Dr. Le Van Minh Tuan

- PhD (defended in May 2017)
- Dissertation title: "Probabilistic Models for Semantic Visualization and Its Applications"
- Publications with the group: AAAI-14, KDD-14, ICDM-14, JAIR-16, IJCAI-16, IJCAI-17, CIKM-17 (demo)
- Awards:
- Employment:
  - Since Aug 2019: Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, USA
  - Aug 2018 - Aug 2019: Visiting Assistant Professor, Oakland University, USA
  - Aug 2017 - Aug 2018: Postdoctoral Researcher at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, USA