Yanyan Lan is the Deputy Dean / Principal Investigator / Professor at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, and a nationally recognized young talent. Her research interests include machine learning, information retrieval, and AI for Science. She has published over 80 papers in journals such as Nature and Science, as well as in top-tier international conferences in the field of artificial intelligence, with over 13,000 Google Scholar citations. She has won the SIGIR Best Student Paper Award, CIKM Best Paper Runner-Up Award, Champion of the international protein structure competition CAMEO, First Prize of the Qian Weichang Chinese Information Processing Science and Technology Award from the Chinese Information Processing Society, and the Youth Innovation Award. She has served as PC Chair and Area Chair for several major international conferences in the AI field and is an Associate Editor of the international journal AI Journal.
Email address:
lanyanyan@air.tsinghua.edu.cn
Education:
2005-2011 Chinese Academy of Sciences Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences (Supervisor: Academician Zhiming Ma) PhD
2001-2005 Shandong University Statistics B.E.
Career:
2021 till now Institute of AI Industrial Research, Tsinghua University Deputy Dean, Principal Investigator, Professor
2019-2021 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Researcher
2018-2019 UC Berkeley Visiting Scholar
2013-2019 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Associate Researcher
2011-2013 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Assistant Researcher
Research Fields:
Dr. Yanyan Lan has an excellent academic record. Her research fields are information retrieval and machine learning. During her time at Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, she headed the Department of Data Science, Key Lab of Network Data Science and Technology, and led the team in fundamental research information retrieval theories, computing paradigms, and interactive mechanisms. Her team’s research went beyond the basic theoretical hypothesis of information retrieval, built the Learning to Rank theory, and came up with a framework for relation-based Learning to Rank and a computing model for deep matching, which shifted information retrieval from a static ranking of results to a dynamic generation of information, greatly improving the utility of information retrieval. Dr. Yanyan Lan published 57 papers on top international conferences and periodicals ranked A-level by China Computer federation. Her H-index stands at 29 and her research has been cited 3800 times on Google cholar. She is the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award of SIGIR 2012 and the Best Paper RunnerUp Award of CIKM 2017, both top international conferences in the area of information retrieval. Her research in this area also won her Microsoft Fellowship, enrollment in Microsoft Star Track program, the title of Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence Young Scientist, and membership of CAS Youth Innovation Promotion Association.
Dr. Yanyan Lan’s academic services cover serving as a long-term (senior) PC member and reviewer for international academic conferences and journals. She was the Chair of SIGIR 2020 Summer School, Chair of CIKM 2020 Short Papers Program Committee, Chair of YSSNLP 2020. She is also a Senior Member of China Computer Federation (CCF), Executive Member of CCF Committee on Terminology, Member of CCF Women’s Committee; Deputy Director of Committee on Communications and Mathematics, China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; Member of Committee on Machine Learning, Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence; and Member of CIPSC Committee on Information Retrieval, Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Dr. Yanyan Lan started supervising students in 2011 and has so far been supervisor to 2 master candidates and 5 doctoral candidates. Her graduate students now work in research institutes such as CAS Institute of Computing Technology and CAS Institute of Software, and Internet companies such as Baidu, Bytedance and JD.com. In 2015, Dr. Yanyan Lan opened machine learning courses at undergraduate and graduate levels in University of Chinese Academy of Science, and her courses have been popular with students ever since.
Selected Publications:
1. Jianing Li&, Yanyan Lan*, Jiafeng Guo, and Xueqi Cheng. On the Relation between Quality-Diversity Evaluation and Distribution-Fitting Goal in Text Generation, ICML2020.
2. Yimeng Chen&, Yanyan Lan*, Ruibin Xiong, Liang Pang, Zhiming Ma and Xueqi Cheng. Evaluating Natural Language Generation via Unbalanced Optimal Transport, IJCAI2020.
3. Hainan Zhang&, Yanyan Lan*, Liang Pang, Hongshen Chen, Zhuoye Ding, and Dawei Yin. Modeling Topical Relevance for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation, IJCAI2020.
4. Jianing Li&, Yanyan Lan*, Jiafeng Guo, Jun Xu and Xueqi Cheng.Differentiated Distribution Recovery for Neural Text Generation, AAAI2019.
5. Liang Pang&, Yanyan Lan*, Jiafeng Guo, Jun Xu, Lixin Su and Xueqi Cheng. HAS-QA: Hierarchical Answer Spans Model for Open-domain Question Answering, AAAI2019.
6. Hainan Zhang&, Yanyan Lan*, Liang Pang, Jiafeng Guo and Xueqi Cheng，ReCoSa: Detecting the Relevant Contexts with Self-Attention for Multi-turn Dialogue Generation, ACL2019.
7. Liang Pang&, Yanyan Lan*, Jiafeng Guo, Jun Xu, Shengxian Wan, and Xueqi Cheng, Text Matching as Image Recognition, AAAI2016.
8. Yadong Zhu&, Yanyan Lan*, Jiafeng Guo, and Xueqi Cheng, Learning for Search Result Diversification, SIGIR2014.
9. Yanyan Lan*, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng, Tie-Yan Liu. Statistical Consistency of Ranking Methods in A Rank-Differentiable Probability Space, NIPS2012.
10. Shuzi Niu&, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan*, and Xueqi Cheng, Top-k Learning to Rank: Labeling, Ranking, and Evaluation, SIGIR2012.
11. Transductive Learning for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer, EMNLP2021.
12. Adaptive Information Seeking for Open-Domain Question Answering, EMNLP2021. HotPotQA Winner
13. Match-Ignition: Plugging PageRank into Transformer for Long-form Text Matching, CIKM2021.
