PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Chenyan Xiong

Chenyan Xiong is an information retrieval researcher whose work spans document ranking, large-scale language-model training and healthcare AI. At Carnegie Mellon, he earned a master's in Language Technologies in 2014 and a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technology in 2018; his 2017 word-entity duet paper linked words and entities for document ranking. He led large-scale language-model training at Microsoft Research from 2018 to 2023 and worked part-time at Meta on recommendation models in 2024. He shared the SIGIR Early Career Research Award in 2023 and led development of CATCH-FM, a health-record tool for cancer-risk prediction, in 2025. As of October 2026, he is an Associate Professor in CMU's Language Technologies Institute, with research in foundation and large language models, information retrieval and healthcare AI.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2014–2018

    Language technology at CMU

    He earns a Master of Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon in 2014 and a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technology in 2018, with Jamie Callan as his academic advisor.

  2. 2017

    Word-entity duet ranking

    With Jamie Callan and Tie-Yan Liu, he introduces Word-Entity Duet Representations for Document Ranking in 2017. The framework combines word-based and entity-based representations through knowledge-graph connections to rank documents.

  3. 2018–2023

    Microsoft Research Redmond

    From 2018 to 2023, he works at Microsoft Research Redmond on conversational search, dense retrieval and large-scale pretraining. He leads the scaling of Microsoft's first wave of large language models in the Megatron and DeepSpeed era.

  4. 2023

    A SIGIR research award

    He shares SIGIR's Early Career Research Award with Hamed Zamani in 2023.

  5. 2024

    Foundation models at Meta

    During 2024, he spends part-time at Meta, where his team builds large-scale foundation models for recommendation systems.

  6. September 2025

    CATCH-FM for cancer risk

    In September 2025, he leads development of CATCH-FM, a healthcare foundation model trained on Taiwanese health records to prescreen for cancer.

  7. April 2026

    Valuing AI training data

    In April 2026, his research on how training data shapes large AI models intersects with questions about how the benefits of AI should be shared.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at CMU

    As of October 2026, he is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute; his research focuses on foundation and large language models, information retrieval, and healthcare AI.

Career

  1. NowCarnegie Mellon UniversityAssociate Professor
  2. 2024Meta
  3. 2018–2023Microsoft Research

Education

  1. 2018Carnegie Mellon UniversityPh.D. in Language and Information Technology
  2. 2014Carnegie Mellon UniversityMaster of Language Technologies

From the biography.

  1. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Chenyan Xiong. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  2. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Chenyan Xiong. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Chenyan Xiong yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Chenyan Xiong - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University lti.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Word-Entity Duet Representations for Document Ranking arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Chenyan Xiong cs.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards sigir.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. AI Tool Uses Health Records To Predict Cancer Risk | Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department csd.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. New CMU, Anaxi Labs collaboration explores how AI ecosystems create and share value - CyLab Security and Privacy Institute cylab.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Chenyan Xiong - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University lti.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.