Ke Yiping, Kelly

Timeline

1. 2003–2008

   Fudan degree and a HKUST PhD

   She earns a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Fudan University in 2003. In 2008, she completes a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

2. 2007–2011

   Best paper awards in database research

   She receives a nomination for the best paper award at the ACM SIGKDD conference in 2007. In 2010, she wins best paper awards at the 15th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications and the 21st Australasian Database Conference. In 2011, ACM Transactions on Database Systems publishes her paper "Finding Maximal Cliques in Massive Networks", written with James Cheng, Ada Fu, Jeffrey Xu Yu and Linhong Zhu, in its special issue on the best papers of SIGMOD 2010.

3. 2012

   Best Industry Project at IHPC

   In 2012, she receives the Best Industry Project award from the Institute of High Performance Computing. Before joining NTU, she is a scientist at A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing and a Research Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

4. 2018

   Most influential scholar in database

   In 2018, AMiner names her a Most Influential Scholar in Database and IJCAI lists her as a Distinguished Senior Program Committee Member.

5. 2019–2023

   Transfer learning with Pengfei Wei

   In 2019, she coauthors with Pengfei Wei and Chi Keong Goh a feature analysis of marginalized stacked denoising autoencoders for unsupervised domain adaptation, published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. A 2020 paper with Wei, Xinghua Qu and Tze-Yun Leong proposes Transfer with Manifolds Discrepancy Alignment (TMDA), which aligns the local distribution discrepancy of each subdomain in a low-dimensional manifold. In 2023, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence publishes her paper with Wei, Yew-Soon Ong and Zejun Ma on adaptive transfer kernel learning for transfer Gaussian process regression.

6. 2020–2025

   Editorial board and area chair roles

   She joins the editorial boards of Memetic Computing in 2020 and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence in 2022. She serves as an area chair for the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2021–2022 and 2024–2025, and for ACM SIGKDD in 2025.

7. 2024–2026

   Brain network models for fMRI

   In 2024, CIKM publishes Contrasformer, a brain network Transformer for neurodegenerative conditions that she coauthors; it improves accuracy by up to 10.8% on four functional brain network datasets. BrainOOD, another coauthored model, appears at ICLR 2025 and outperforms 16 existing methods while improving generalization to out-of-distribution subjects by up to 8.5%. A March 2026 preprint she coauthors introduces MV-BrainFM, a brain network foundation model tested on more than 20K subjects from 17 fMRI datasets.

8. As of October 2026

   Associate Professor at NTU

   She is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing & Data Science at Nanyang Technological University, working on graph learning and transfer learning and applying AI to physics modeling and engineering. Her paper "Bridge Breaking for Graph Neural Networks", written with Wei Li, Jiaxing Xu and Xia Dong, appears in the proceedings of WSDM 2026, held in Boise in February 2026.