Yiling Chen

Timeline

1. 1996–2005

   Economics degrees and a PhD

   She earns a bachelor's degree in economics from Renmin University of China in 1996 and a master's degree in economics from Tsinghua University in 1999. After beginning doctoral work at Iowa State University in 2000, she moves in 2001 to the information sciences and technology program at Pennsylvania State University, where she completes her PhD in 2005.

2. 2006–2008

   Yahoo! Research and Harvard

   From 2006 to 2008, she works as a postdoctoral research scientist at Yahoo! Research. In 2008, she joins the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor of computer science.

3. 2010–2011

   NSF CAREER award and IEEE list

   In 2010, she wins a $461,798 National Science Foundation CAREER award to establish strategic and computational foundations for prediction markets. IEEE Intelligent Systems names her to its AI's 10 to Watch list in 2011 while she serves as an assistant professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

4. 2012–2016

   Harvard tenure and alumni award

   Harvard promotes her to associate professor in 2012, names her the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Natural Sciences in 2013, and promotes her to full professor with tenure in 2015. She serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and is slated to co-chair the program committee for the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. Penn State selects her for the Graduate School Alumni Society Early Career Award in 2016.

5. 2019

   Fair classification and social welfare

   With Lily Hu, she presents a welfare-based analysis of classification and fairness regimes in a 2019 paper, Fair Classification and Social Welfare. The paper shows that stricter parity constraints can worsen welfare outcomes for both groups.

6. February 2023

   Program chair of AAAI-23

   With Jennifer Neville, she serves as program chair of the AAAI-23 Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Washington, D.C., in February 2023.

7. 2025

   Strategic classification and prediction markets

   With Safwan Hossain, Evi Micha, and Ariel Procaccia, she studies strategic classification in a 2025 ICLR paper, Strategic Classification With Externalities, whose model lets one agent's feature manipulation affect another and establishes learning guarantees for classifiers. In July 2025, she publishes Self-Resolving Prediction Markets for Unverifiable Outcomes with Siddarth Srinivasan and Ezra Karger at the 26th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and AI teacher at Harvard

   As of October 2026, she is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where she focuses on the robustness, integrity, and oversight of AI systems. Her research connects artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science with social sciences, including an October 2026 Conference on Language Modeling paper on peer-predictive self-training for language model reasoning coauthored with Shi Feng, Hanlin Zhang, Fan Nie, and Sham Kakade. In fall 2026, she teaches Harvard's course Topics at the Interface between Computer Science and Economics, which includes readings on AI, economic theory, and multi-agent systems.