PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yangqiu Song

Also known as Yang Song, 宋陽秋

Yangqiu Song is an AI researcher whose work uses knowledge graphs and language models to represent events, e-commerce intentions, and privacy risks. He earned degrees at Tsinghua before research roles at IBM and Microsoft and academic posts at HKUST, UIUC, and West Virginia University. His work includes ASER, a large-scale eventuality knowledge graph; FolkScope, an e-commerce intention graph; and GoldCoin, which grounds language models in privacy laws and won the 2024 EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award. As of October 2026, he is an associate professor at HKUST, co-director of its WeBank Joint Lab, and associate director of its Center for Artificial Intelligence for Law; he served as a visiting academic scholar at Amazon A9 and Rufus from 2022 to 2026.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2003–2009

    Tsinghua degrees and internships

    At Tsinghua University, he earns a B.E. in 2003 and a PhD in 2009. He interns at IBM Research-China in 2006–2007 and Google in 2007–2008.

  2. 2009–2012

    Research at IBM and Microsoft

    He joins IBM Research-China as a staff researcher in 2009 and becomes an associate researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in 2010.

  3. 2012–2016

    Postdocs and a WVU professorship

    From 2012 to 2013, he works as a postdoc researcher at HKUST and a visiting researcher at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab in Hong Kong. He is a postdoc at UIUC from 2013 to 2015, then an assistant professor in WVU's Lane Department of CSEE from 2015 to 2016.

  4. 2016

    Assistant professor at HKUST

    He becomes an assistant professor jointly appointed in Computer Science and Engineering and Mathematics at HKUST in 2016.

  5. 2019–2020

    The ASER knowledge graph

    He coauthors ASER, a large-scale eventuality knowledge graph extracted from more than 11 billion tokens of unstructured text. The preprint appears in 2019, and its third version is dated January 2020.

  6. 2023

    FolkScope models e-commerce intentions

    In 2023, he coauthors FolkScope, an intention knowledge graph for e-commerce commonsense that uses large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation.

  7. 2024

    GoldCoin wins an EMNLP award

    In 2024, he coauthors GoldCoin, a framework that grounds language models in privacy laws through contextual integrity theory. It wins the 2024 EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor and lab co-director

    From 2022 to 2026, he serves as a visiting academic scholar at Amazon A9 and Rufus Team. As of October 2026, he is an associate professor in HKUST's Department of CSE, co-director of the HKUST-WeBank Joint Lab, and associate director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence for Law.

Career

  1. Since 2012Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyPost-doc researcher
  2. 2022–2026AmazonVisiting academic scholar
  3. 2015–2016West Virginia UniversityAssistant professor
  4. 2013–2015University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignPost-doc researcher
  5. 2012–2013HuaweiVisiting researcher
  6. From 2010Microsoft Research AsiaAssociate researcher
  7. 2007–2008GoogleIntern
  8. 2006–2007IBMIntern, Staff researcher

Education

  1. 2009Tsinghua UniversityPhD
  2. 2003Tsinghua UniversityB.E.

From the biography.

  1. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Yangqiu Song. 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. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Amazon. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  3. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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

  1. Yangqiu Song home.cse.ust.hk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. In Focus - Issue 28 (Fall 2016) – Page 35 seng.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. [1905.00270] ASER: A Large-scale Eventuality Knowledge Graph arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. GoldCoin: Grounding Large Language Models in Privacy Laws via Contextual Integrity Theory aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Best Papers - EMNLP 2024 2024.emnlp.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Yangqiu SONG | HKUST CSE cse.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 22 October 2026.