Keynote speaker: Dr Hongzhi Yin, The University of Queensland, Australia

Title: Mining Geo-social Networks for Spatial Item Recommendation

Abstract:The rapid development of Web 2.0, location acquisition and wireless communication technologies has fostered a profusion of geo-social networks (e.g., Foursquare, Yelp and Google Place). They provide users an online platform to check-in at points of interests (e.g., cinemas, galleries and hotels) and share their life experiences in the physical world via mobile devices. The new dimension of location implies extensive knowledge about an individual’s behaviors and interests by bridging the gap between online social networks and the physical world. It is crucial to develop spatio-temporal recommendation services for mobile users to explore the new places, attend new events and find their potentially preferred spatial items from billions of candidate ones. Compared with traditional recommendation tasks, the spatio-temporal recommendation faces the following new challenges: Travel Locality, Spatial Dynamics of User Interests, Temporal Dynamics of User Interests, Sequential Influence of user mobility behaviours and Real-time Requirement. In this talk, I will present our recent advancement of spatio-temporal recommendation techniques and how to address these unique challenges.

Bio:  Dr. Hongzhi Yin is now working as a lecturer in data science and an ARC DECRA Fellow (Australia Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) with The University of Queensland, Australia. He received his doctoral degree from Peking University in July 2014.  After graduation, he joined the school of ITEE, the University of Queensland.  He successfully won the ARC DECRA award in 2015 and obtained an ARC Discovery Project grant as a chief investigator in 2016. His current main research interests include social media analytic, user profiling, recommender system, especially spatial-temporal recommendation, topic discovery and event detection, deep learning, user linkage across social networks, knowledge graph mining and construction.  He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals and top international conferences including ACM TOIS, VLDBJ, IEEE TKDE, ACM TKDD, ACM TIST, ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGKDD, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, AAAI, SIGIR, WWW, ACM Multimedia, ICDM, WSDM and CIKM. He has been actively engaged in professional services by serving as conference organizers, conference PC members for PVLDB, SIGIR, ICDE, IJCAI, ICDM, CIKM, DASFAA, ASONAM, MDM, WISE, PAKDD and reviewer of more than 10 reputed journals such as VLDB Journal, TKDE, TOIS, TKDD, TWeb, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, WWW Journal, Knowledge-based system and etc.