PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Hongzhi Yin

Hongzhi Yin is a computer scientist at the University of Queensland whose research centres on recommender systems, spatio-temporal prediction and decentralised on-device learning. He completed a PhD at Peking University in 2014 and received an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award in 2016. A paper on group recommendation won the Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, and an ARC Future Fellowship followed in 2021. IEEE Intelligent Systems named him to its AI's 10 to Watch list for 2022, and in 2023 he won a Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award. Promoted to professor in 2024, he is the director of UQ's Responsible Big Data & Intelligence Lab.

Timeline

  1. 2014

    A Peking University doctorate

    His doctoral thesis at Peking University wins the university's Distinguished Doctor Degree Thesis Award in June 2014, and he receives the degree in July 2014.

  2. 2016

    ARC early-career award

    He receives an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2016 as sole chief investigator of "Mobile User Modelling for Intelligent Recommendation", a project that runs from 2016 to 2018. In 2016, he also coauthors a paper in ACM Transactions on Information Systems on joint modeling of user check-in behaviors for real-time point-of-interest recommendation, with Bin Cui, Xiaofang Zhou, Weiqing Wang, Zi Huang and Shazia Sadiq.

  3. 2018–2019

    Best paper at ICDE 2019

    He is promoted to senior lecturer in December 2018. In April 2019, his paper on social influence-based group representation learning for group recommendation, written with Qinyong Wang, Kai Zheng, Zhixu Li, Jiali Yang and Xiaofang Zhou, wins the Best Paper Award at the 35th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering in Macau.

  4. 2020–2021

    Associate professor and Future Fellow

    He is promoted to associate professor in December 2020. In August 2021, he is granted an ARC Future Fellowship for the project "Decentralised Collaborative Predictive Analytics on Personal Smart Devices", which runs from 2022 to 2026.

  5. 2022

    Simple contrastive learning for recommendation

    With Junliang Yu, Xin Xia, Tong Chen, Lizhen Cui and Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, he shows in a paper for SIGIR 2022 that graph augmentations play a trivial role in contrastive-learning recommenders, and the team proposes a simple method that adds uniform noise to the embedding space to create contrastive views. In 2022, he also coauthors a survey of self-supervised learning for recommender systems, accepted by TKDE, which sorts methods into contrastive, generative, predictive and hybrid groups and releases the open-source library SELFRec.

  6. 2022

    IEEE AI's 10 to Watch

    IEEE Intelligent Systems names him one of ten recipients of its 2022 AI's 10 to Watch award for rising stars in artificial intelligence. The citation covers his work on trustworthy data intelligence, lightweight on-device predictive analytics, and recommendation and decentralized machine learning on massive, heterogeneous data. At the time, he is an associate professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Queensland.

  7. 2023

    Tall Poppy and a WSDM honour

    He receives a Best Paper Award with Honorable Mention at the 16th ACM International WSDM Conference in March 2023. In 2023, he is also one of ten University of Queensland researchers who win a Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award, an initiative of the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.

  8. Since 2024

    Professor and lab director

    The University of Queensland promotes him to Professor (Level E) in January 2024, and he directs the Responsible Big Data & Intelligence Lab, with research on recommender systems, spatio-temporal prediction, LLMs and ChatBI, and decentralized and edge intelligence. In October 2025, his ARC Discovery Project 2026, "Advancing Federated Learning for Unified Urban Spatio-Temporal Predictions", is granted and funded. In 2026, he serves as PC Co-Chair for ICDM 2027 and ADMA 2026 and as Research Track Chair for the ACM Web Conference 2027.

Career

  1. Since 2024University of QueenslandSenior Lecturer, Professor

Education

  1. 2014Peking UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Queensland. 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.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Queensland. 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.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of Queensland. 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.
  4. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of Queensland. 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.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Prof. Hongzhi Yin, UQ - Awards sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Hongzhi Yin | DeepAI deepai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Prof. Hongzhi Yin, UQ - Research Grants sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Prof. Hongzhi Yin, UQ - Featured Publications sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Prof. Hongzhi Yin, UQ - Historical News sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [2112.08679] Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [2203.15876] Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. 2022 AI's 10 to Watch Announced | IEEE Computer Society computer.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Associate Professor Hongzhi Yin Named in IEEE 'AI's 10 to Watch' List 2022 - Artificial Intelligence at UQ ai.uq.edu.au. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. UQ researchers recognised as emerging scientific leaders - News - The University of Queensland news.uq.edu.au. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Prof. Hongzhi Yin, UQ sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Professor Hongzhi Yin | UQ Experts about.uq.edu.au. Checked 21 October 2026.