Professor Xiangyu ZHAO, Assistant Professor of the School of Data Science (SDSC), received two prestigious research awards from the renowned China Computer Federation (CCF), along with two leading Internet companies in China, Ant Group and Tencent. These awards recognize Professor ZHAO’s contributions to the field of AI for Recommender Systems and Online Advertising, and underscore the significance of SDSC’s ongoing research endeavors.
CCF and Ant Group jointly released the "CCF-Ant Green Computing Special Research Fund 《螞蟻綠色計算專項科研基金》" (the “Fund”) in September 2022 with the aim to support data scientists to explore more efficient and greener algorithms to achieve the goals of high efficiency and low carbon consumption. This year 134 scholars from 63 top-ranked universities submitted project applications. In its result announcement, 27 projects from 19 universities were successfully shortlisted and a project under Professor Xiangyu ZHAO, entitled “Automatic Network Search Optimization for Complex AI Models Under Carbon Efficiency Constraints《碳效率約束下的複雜AI模型的自動網路結構搜索優化》”, has outbid the other 80% contestants and successfully listed as one of the 27 winning projects. Each of the awardee will receive a financial support in the range of RMB$250,000-400,000.
Professor Zhao also snatched another award – “2023 Tencent Advertising Rhino-Bird Specialty Research Scheme《騰訊廣告犀牛鳥專項研究計畫》” (the “Scheme”) in June 2023. His project - "Research on Sequence Recommendation Modeling Based on Heterogeneous Behavior Perception and Multi-interest Learning 《基於異構行為感知多興趣學習的序列推薦建模研究》" was successfully selected. This year, 90% of the applicants are from top 985 universities, and the selected scholars are all exemplary in related fields. The selection rate of this Scheme is about 11%. Advertising is one of the most important business models in the Internet industry, and it is also a field where big data and artificial intelligence technologies are widely used. The Scheme is based on the technical challenges of real-life advertising scenarios, focusing on research directions such as machine learning, data mining, and large-scale model algorithms, and supports industry-university cooperation in key technology breakthroughs and innovative application exploration.