PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Gang Chen

Also known as 陈刚

Gang Chen is a computer scientist at Zhejiang University whose database research reaches machine learning systems and weakly supervised learning. The Ministry of Education named him a Yangtze River Scholars Distinguished Professor in 2017, and the epiC big data system he coauthored won a VLDB 2014 Best Paper Award. He coauthored the Rafiki machine learning service in 2018 and the PiCO partial label learning paper, which received an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICLR 2022. He is a professor and vice president at Zhejiang University.

Timeline

  1. 2007–2017

    Yangtze River Scholars Professor

    He is selected for the Ministry of Education's New Century Talent Support Program in 2007, wins the Zhongchuang Software Talent Award in 2012, and becomes a Distinguished Professor of the ministry's Yangtze River Scholars Award Program in 2017. He also joins the third batch of national "Million Plan" technology innovation leaders. A professor at Zhejiang University, he holds the posts of Dean of Computer Science and Director of the Software Institute, with research in databases and big data, including real-time big data processing and cloud database management.

  2. 2014

    A VLDB best paper

    He coauthors "epiC: an Extensible and Scalable System for Processing Big Data" with Dawei Jiang, Beng Chin Ooi, Kian-Lee Tan and Sai Wu. VLDB 2014 lists the paper among its Best Paper Awards.

  3. 2016

    Database meets deep learning

    In 2016, he coauthors the SIGMOD Record vision article "Database Meets Deep Learning: Challenges and Opportunities" with Wei Wang, Meihui Zhang, H. V. Jagadish, Beng Chin Ooi and Kian-Lee Tan. It discusses improvements to deep learning systems from a database perspective and database applications that may benefit from deep learning.

  4. 2017–2018

    Blockchain benchmarks and ForkBase

    In 2017, he coauthors "Untangling Blockchain: A Data Processing View of Blockchain Systems", which surveys private blockchains and presents the BLOCKBENCH framework, evaluated on Ethereum, Parity and Hyperledger Fabric. In 2018, he coauthors ForkBase, a storage engine for blockchain and forkable applications with data versioning, fork semantics and tamper evidence.

  5. 2018

    The Rafiki analytics service

    In 2018, he coauthors Rafiki with Wei Wang, Sheng Wang, Jinyang Gao, Meihui Zhang, Teck Khim Ng and Beng Chin Ooi. The system provides training and inference services for machine learning models on cloud platforms, with distributed hyper-parameter tuning for training and online ensemble modeling for inference.

  6. 2020

    Pyramid for nested NER

    In 2020, he coauthors "Pyramid: A Layered Model for Nested Named Entity Recognition" with Jue Wang, Lidan Shou and Ke Chen, published at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The model stacks flat NER layers in a pyramid shape, and its hidden state at layer l represents an l-gram of the input text.

  7. 2022

    PiCO at ICLR 2022

    In 2022, he coauthors "PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning" with Haobo Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Yixuan Li, Lei Feng, Gang Niu and Junbo Zhao. The framework pairs a contrastive learning module with a class prototype-based label disambiguation algorithm, and ICLR 2022 gives it an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention.

  8. As of October 2026

    Vice president of Zhejiang University

    He is Vice President of Zhejiang University. In April 2025, he and Ashraf Al Najdawi of Khalifa University present plans for cooperation between the two universities in scientific research and sustainable development.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Zhejiang 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.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Zhejiang University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Zhejiang University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Zhejiang 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.

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 Gang Chen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. GANG Chen | DBsystem Structured Data comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Gang Chen | MLCask comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. VLDB2014 - Tutorials vldb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Database Meets Deep Learning: Challenges and Opportunities – SIGMOD Record sigmodrecord.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. [1906.08986] Database Meets Deep Learning: Challenges and Opportunities arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [1708.05665] Untangling Blockchain: A Data Processing View of Blockchain Systems arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [1802.04949] ForkBase: An Efficient Storage Engine for Blockchain and Forkable Applications arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. [1804.06087] Rafiki: Machine Learning as an Analytics Service System arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Pyramid: A Layered Model for Nested Named Entity Recognition - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. ICLR Poster PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICLR 2022 | Center for Advanced Intelligence Project aip.riken.jp. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. CHEN Gang zju.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  13. Zhejiang University and Khalifa University deepen partnership with new joint initiatives zju.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.