Rong Yan Research Scientist Facebook 1601 S. California Ave Palo Alto, CA, 94304 E-mail address: yanrong at gmail dot com

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I am now working in Facebook as a Research Scientist, focusing on digital / social media analysis, and large-scale data mining / machine learning.
Drop me a note if you are interested in joining Facebook! (http://www.facebook.com/careers/)

I worked in IBM TJ Watson Research center as a Research Staff Member from 11/2006 to 11/2009.
Research interests: digital / social media analysis, large-scale machine learning, information retrieval and computer vision
My previous project is IBM Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval (iMARS) (demo), which won the 2004 Wall Street Journal Innovation Award (Multimedia category).
I’ve developed large-scale and efficient machine learning and media analysis algorithms / systems for massive data collections.
I’ve also been working on multiple large-scale analytic platforms, e.g., Hadoop, IBM Infosphere-Stream, UIMA

I got my PhD degree from Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University in Oct. 2006.
Dissertation: abstract (.txt), summary (.ps, .pdf), full thesis (.ps, .pdf) 

• Personal Info
• CV
• Publications
• MATLABArsenal
• Links

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What’s New

•  Program Co-Chair, ACM Multimedia (ACM MM), Nara, Japan, 2012
•  Publicity Co-Chair, ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), Hong Kong, 2012
•  Keynote speaker, “Large-Scale Social Media Mining in Facebook”,
           Workshop on Social Media and Mining, co-located with ACM Multimedia, Nov. 2011
•  Invited lecturer, “Social Media Mining: Insights, Methods and Practices for Analyzing Social Media”,
          China Computer Federation, Advanced Disciplines Lectures on “Social Networks”, Oct. 2011

•  Invited presentation, “Large-Scale Social Media Mining in Facebook”, NASA IS&T Colloquium Series, Oct. 2011
•  Invited presentation, “Large-Scale Social Data Mining Challenge in Facebook”, The 3rd Workshop on
          Large-scale Data Mining: Theory and Applications (LDMTA 2011), co-located with SIGKDD, Aug. 2011

•  Co-chair, 5th Workshop on “Social Network Analysis (SNAKDD)”, SIGKDD, Aug. 2011
•  Invited presentation, “Large-Scale Machine Learning using MapReduce”, Data Mining Meetup, San Francisco, Aug. 2011
• Invited presentation, “Large-scale Data Mining Challenge in Facebook”, Univ. California of Santa Cruz, May 2011
• Invited presentation, “Large-scale Social Media Analysis in Facebook”, Penn State Univ., Apr. 2011
• Invited presentation, “Large-scale Analysis of Connected Media”, Michigan State Univ., Mar. 2011
• Invited presentation, “Face detection and suggestion in Facebook”, IS&T/SPIE EI, Multimedia Content Access, Jan. 2011
• Co-chair, Workshop on “Machine Learning for Social Computing”, Neural Information Processing System (NIPS), 2010
• Guest lecture, “Active Learning”, CMU Silicon Valley Campus, Nov. 2010
• Tutorial, “Large-scale data mining: MapReduce and beyond”, in KDD’10, with Jimeng Sun and Spiros Papadimitriou
• Invited presentation, “Large-Scale Challenge of Data Mining and Multimedia in Facebook”, Stanford, AIRS workshop, Jun. 2010
• Invited presentation, “Large-Scale Challenge of Data Mining and Multimedia in Facebook”, UC Irvine, CS Dept., May 2010
• Face detection and recognition in Facebook (link)
• Congratulations to the inaugural Facebook Fellowship winners (link)

Selected Recent Publications [Full List]

Michele Cossalter, Rong Yan, Lu Zheng, Adaptive Kernel Approximation for Large-Scale Non-Linear SVM Prediction. In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2011

Huan-Kai Peng, Jiang Zhu, Dongzhen Piao, Rong Yan and Ying Zhang, Retweet Modeling Using Conditional Random Fields, to appear in the Proceedings of DMCCI 2011: ICDM 2011 Workshop on Data Mining Technologies for Computational Collective Intelligence, 2011

Shenghua Bao, Shengliang Xu, Li Zhang, Rong Yan, Dingyi Han, Zhong Su and Yong Yu, Mining Social Emotions from Affective Text, In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Aug. 2011

Lei Ding, Alper Yilmaz, Rong Yan, Interactive Image Segmentation Using Dirichlet Process Multiple View Learning,
In IEEE Transaction on Image Processing, 2012

Rong Yan, Marc-Olivier Fleury, Michele Merler, Apostol Natsev, John R. Smith, Large-Scale Multimedia Semantic Concept Modeling using Robust Subspace Bagging and MapReduce, In ACM Multimedia, Workshop LS-MMRM’09

Rong Yan, Jian Zhang, Transfer Learning using Task-Level Features with Application to Information Retrieval, In Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2009

Michele Merler, Rong Yan, John R. Smith, Imbalanced RankBoost for Efficiently Ranking Large-Scale Image/Video Collections,  In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2009

Deepak S. Turaga, Brian Foo, Olivier Verscheure and Rong Yan, Configuring Topologies of Distributed Semantic Concept Classifiers for Continuous Multimedia Stream Processing, In ACM Multimedia, 2008

Rong Yan, Apostol Natsev, Murray Campbell, A Learning-based Hybrid Tagging and Browsing Approach for Efficient Manual Image Annotation, In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2008.

Rong Yan, Jelena Tesic and John R. Smith, Model-Shared Subspace Boosting for Multi-label Classification, In ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD), 2007

Jun Yang, Rong Yan, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Cross-Domain Video Concept Detection Using Adaptive SVMs, In ACM Multimedia, 2007.

Jian Zhang and Rong Yan, On the Value of Pairwise Constraints in Classification and Consistency, In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2007.

Rong Yan and Alexander G. Hauptmann, Probabilistic Latent Query Analysis for Combining Multiple Retrieval Sources, In ACM SIGIR, 2006

Rong Yan, Jian Zhang, Jie Yang and Alexander G. Hauptmann, A Discriminative Learning Framework with Pairwise Constraints for Video Object Classification, In IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 28, 2006  

Professional Services

Tutorial, “Large-scale data mining: MapReduce and beyond”, in KDD’10, with Jimeng Sun and Spiros Papadimitriou

Tutorial, “Large-scale data mining: MapReduce and beyond”, in ICDM’09, with Jimeng Sun and Spiros Papadimitriou (slides)

Tutorial, “Content-based and Concept-based Retrieval for Large-Scale Image/Video Collections” in ACM Multimedia’09, with Winston Hsu (reviews)
Tutorial, “Content-based and Semantic-based Image/Video Retrieval” in ICASSP’09, with Winston Hsu
Tutorial, “Content-based and Semantic-based Image/Video Retrieval” in SIGIR’08, with Winston Hsu
Tutorial, “Recent Developments in Content-based and Concept-based Image/Video Retrieval” in ACM Multimedia’08, with Winston Hsu

Panelist, NSF proposal review panel, CAREER and Intelligent & Information Systems
External Reviewer, Hong Kong Research Council / Nanyang Technological University Research Council

Workshop Co-Chair, 5th Workshop on “Social Network Analysis (SNAKDD)”, SIGKDD, 2011

Publication Co-Chair, International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), 2011
Workshop Co-Chair, “Machine Learning for Social Computing”, Neural Information Processing System (NIPS), 2010

Workshop Co-Chair, “Analysis and Evaluation of Large-Scale Multimedia Collections”, Intl. Conf. on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2010

Workshop Co-Chair, “High Performance Analytics - Algorithms, Implementations, and Applications”, SIAM Data Mining (SDM), 2010

Workshop Co-Chair, ACM Workshop on “Large-scale Multimedia Retrieval and Mining”, 2009

Publication Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2009
Co-Chair, Best Paper award in International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), 2009
Co-Chair, VideOlympics showcase event in ACM CIVR'07-'09

Associate Editor, IEEE Multimedia, 2011 -

Program committee member for Intl. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML), 2011

Program committee member for ACM Multimedia 2007-11

Program committee member for Intl. Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2011-12

Program committee member for Intl. Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011

Program committee member for Intelligent User Interface (IUI), 2011

Program committee member for WWW, 2010-11
Program committee member for AAAI, 2010
Program committee member for ACM SIGIR Conference, 2007-10
Program committee member for Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2008-10
Program committee member for Intl. Conf. on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2010
Program committee member for ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR), 2007-11
Program committee member for International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2006-09
Program committee member for European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2008
Program committee member for International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2009-10

Program committee member for International Conference on Machine Learning, Workshop on Multi-Labeled Data (ICML-MLD) 2010

Review committee member for IEEE ICASSP, 2009 - 10
Review committee member for ACM SIGCHI, 2008 - 09

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Trans. on PAMI, IEEE Trans. on Neural Network, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, IEEE Trans. on TKDE, IEEE Trans. on SMC-B, Machine Learning Journal, Multimedia System Journal, Information Retrieval, Pattern Analysis and Applications, EUSAIP Image and Video Processing, Journal of Multimedia, Visual Computer,…
Other Conference Reviewers: CVPR’04/’05/’06, ECCV’06, ICCV’03, ACCV’03, ICIP’04, ICPR’06, ACM Multimedia’04/’05, MMSP’05, CIVR’06, …

Other Activities

• Guest lecture, “Large-Scale Machine Learning - Algorithms and Platforms”, CMU Silicon Valley Campus, Apr. 2010 (link)
• Guest lecture, “Pictures and words: Matching Images to Words in Large-Scale Dataset”, CS 223B: Introduction to Computer Vision, Stanford University, Mar. 2010 (link)
• Guest editor, “IEEE Multimedia Special Issue on Large-Scale Multimedia Corpus, Retrieval and Mining” (link) with Benoit Huet (Eurecom) and Rahul Sukthankar (Intel Research and CMU)
• Co-chair, Workshop on High Performance Analytics - Algorithms, Implementations, and Applications (link), co-located with SDM’10, with Amol Ghoting (IBM Research) and Xifeng Yan (UCSB)
• Invited talk, “Towards iMARS 2.0: Algorithms and Platforms for Large-scale Multimedia Analysis”, in “Large-Scale Cross-Media Retrieval Workshop”, Hangzhou, China, Oct. 2009
  Other recent invited talks: HKUST in Hong Kong, City Univ. in Hong Kong, SUNY-Albany 
• We are currently organizing the 5^th IBM Watson Workshop on “Emerging Leader in Multimedia”, Oct. 8 – 9, 2009. You can follow the status update via Facebook or Twitter.
• I, together with Qi Tian (MSRA), John R. Smith (IBM), Rahul Sukthankar (Intel and CMU), are organizing a workshop in ACM Multimedia 2009 on “Large-scale Multimedia Retrieval and Mining”.
  The workshop website is here.  Submission deadline is Jun. 19, 2009.
• A recent media report related to our project is here
  The title means “Search Machines vs. Video Tsunami” in English in case you need helps for reading Dutch.
  You can find more details in Cees Snoek’s webpage.

• Some other press release on our projects (originally named MARVEL)
  “BBC and IBM Create Strategic Alliance to Embrace the Digital Future”, 2007 (IBM)
  “IBM Research: mining for future of search”, 2007 (ZDNet)
  “Google meets TiVo”, 2005 (Economist)
  “In search of better video search”, 2004 (InformationWeek)

• Our iMARS video retrieval system wins the People’s Choice Award in ACM VideOlympics 2008
• Our paper “How many high-level concepts will fill the semantic gap in news video retrieval?” won the best paper runner-up award in CIVR’07

Personal Info

• I’ve got my PhD degree from Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University in Oct. 2006.
  Advisor: Alex G. Hauptmann    Affiliation: Language Technologies Institute, Informedia / CareMedia project
• I’ve got my B.S. degree in Computer Science Department from Tsinghua University in July 2001
• Non-research interest: Basketball, Badminton, Swimming, Go, Pool, Soccer, Reading, Movies, Travel

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Last modified: Apr. 5, 2009