Nan Li's Homepage

Nan Li

I am now a Principal Engineer at Microsoft STC-Asia. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2020, I was a Staff Engineer in Alibaba DAMO Academy, the Machine Intelligence Department headed by Dr. Rong Jin. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor at Soochow University. I obtained Ph.D. from the LAMDA Group at Nanjing University, supervised by Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou.

I am a Machine Learning researcher and R&D team leader with well-balanced academia and industry experience. My interest is to design and implement web-scale smart decision-making systems using cutting-edge machine learning and optimization technologies. I am currently working on online advertising, personalized search and recommender systems.

Recent Work

I am serving as Area Chair of IJCAI-2021, the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada.
Paper "Maximizing cumulative user engagement in sequential recommendation: An online optimization perspective" , published at KDD-2020, San Diego, CA, 2020.08
Invited Talk "Traffic shaping: Online learning and optimization in e-commerce", presented at INFORMS-2019, Seattle, Washington, 2019.10
Paper "Learning to rank proposals for object detection" , published at ICCV-2019, Seoul, Korea, 2019.10
Two Papers "Hybrid item-item recommendation via semi-parametric embedding" and "A practical semi-parametric contextual bandits", published at IJCAI-2019, Macau, China, 2019.07
Two Papers "Semi-parametric sampling for stochastic bandits with many arms" and "Robust online matching with user arrival distribution drift", published at AAAI-2019, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2019.01

Experience

Working Experience

Principal Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft, 2020.01-now
Staff Algorithm Engineer, Machine Intelligence Technology, Alibaba DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, 2017.07-2019.12
Senior Algorithm Engineer, iDST & Search BU, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, 2015.09-2017.07
Assistant Professor, School of Mathematical Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, 2008.08-2015.03
Visiting Researcher, IBM China Research Lab, Shanghai, 2013.06-2013.11
Visiting Researcher, TELECOM SubParis, Paris, 2011.01-2011.06

Education

Ph.D., LAMDA Group, Department of Computer Science and Technology , Nanjing University, 2010.09 to 2015.08
Supervisor : Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou, Dissertation : Top Rank Learning and Its Applications [in Chinese]
M.Sc., LAMDA Group, Department of Computer Science and Technology , Nanjing University, 2005.09 to 2008.07
Supervisor : Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou, Dissertation : Research on Semi-Naive Bayes Classifiers and Selective Ensemble [in Chinese]
B.Sc., School of Mathematical Sciences, Soochow University, 2001.09-2005.07
Major : Informatics and Computational Mathematics

Awards & Honors

151 Talents Projects, Zhejiang Province Government (2018)
Submarine Award of Xianyu, Alibaba (2018 & 2019)
Outstanding Contribution Award of AliOS, Alibaba (2016)
Best Poster Award , MLA (2014)
Baidu Scholarship (2013)
IBM PhD Fellowship Award (2013-2014)
Champion of PAKDD 2012 Data Mining Competition (with C. Qian, S.-Y. Li, Y. Zhu, Q. Da and Z.-H. Zhou）
Best Paper Runner-Up Award at MobiQuitous 2011 (with C. Chen, D. Zhang, P.S. Castro, L. Sun and S. Li）

Professional Activities

Invited Talks (recent):
- Traffic shaping: Online learning and optimization in e-commerce, INFORMS-2019, Seattle, Washington, 2019.10
- Operations research applications in Alibaba [in Chinese], Alibaba Cloud Beijing Submit, Beijing, China, 2019.03
- Traffic shaping in online content distribution, NeurIPS-2018 Workskop video understanding in Youku, Montreal, Canada, 2018.12
Conference Program Committee (recent, not complete) :
- Area Chair/Senior PC member: IJCAI-2021, IJCAI-2020, AAAI-2019, IJCAI-2015
- PC member: AAAI-2020, KDD-2019, IJCAI-2019 , AAAI-2018, ICML-2018, IJCAI-2017, NIPS-2017
Journal Reviewer (not complete): ACM Transactions on Big Data, Journal of Machine Learing Research, Machine Learning Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of the American Statistical Association, IEEE Intelligence Systems, Neurocomputing (Elsevier), The Computer Journal (Oxford University Press), Science in China (Series A: Mathematics), Science in China (Series F: Information Science), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (Springer), Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (WILEY) - International Journal of Applied Mathematics, Statistics - Frontiers of Computer Science in China (Springer)