Jialing Tang honored with 2020 Withrow Distinguish Junior Scholar Award

Jiliang Tang is considered by many to be a star in data mining and data science. Since joining MSU in 2016, he has distinguished himself in both research and teaching scholarship. He has created a well-rounded research agenda that includes identifying actionable patterns and insights and extracting knowledge from data, especially graphs.

 

Jiliang Tang honored as a 2020 Withrow Junior Scholar at MSU.

Tang’s scholarly efforts are building computational methods to advance critical interdisciplinary applications. He is also designing systems and tools to enable data analytics for researchers who are unable to extract needed information for their work. His research contributions are seminal, exploring new ideas or directions in the field, and are therefore widely cited by other researchers. More than 30 of his papers have been cited more than 100 times each, with an h-index of 50 and an aggregate of over 10,000 citations.

As one nominator said, the novelty and innovation of his research scholarship is evident by his numerous prestigious awards. Tang received a 2019 NSF CAREER Award, IJCAI Early Career Award, the 2019 AMiner Most Influential Scholar Award and the 2015 KDD Best Dissertation Award Runner-up. He is past recipient of seven best paper awards or runner-up for such honors.

His research momentum includes creating the Data Science and Engineering Lab, with two visiting professors, 16 PhD, three master, and five undergraduate students. He will graduate two PhD students the summer of 2020 -- one has accepted an offer from the computer science department of Vanderbilt University as a tenure-track assistant professor and the other has accepted an offer from LinkedIn as a research scientist.

He has published numerous papers from top conferences and in journals, making sure to include the contributions of his students. He has obtained 19 internal and external grants to fund his research agenda.

He is an active collaborator in the college and across MSU. His industrial collaborations include Criteo, Ford, JD.com, TAL, Google, and others.

As another nominator said, Tang brings an amazing collegiality and scientific strength to his collaborative work. Added another nominator, he has become the “go-to guy” when machine learning is needed.