Yu Sun

Machine Learning Engineer

Search and Recommendation

Twitter Inc.


I am currently a Machine Learning Engineer/Researcher at Twitter. I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne in 2017. Before commencing my Ph.D. in 2013, I worked for seven months at Nanyang Technological University. I obtained my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Renmin University of China in 2012. I was a software engineering intern at Google Research in 2017. I visited the Social Computing Group of Microsoft Research Asia in 2015.

My research interests include context-aware recommendation, personalization, and spatial/temporal data mining, management and visualization.


Email: yusun.aldrich AT (hint: I am using Google mail)
Address: c/o Twitter Inc.
1355 Market St #900, San Francisco, CA, USA

Publications


  • Yan Xia, Yu Sun, Tian Wang, Juan Caicedo Carvajal, Jinliang Fan, Bhargav Mangipudi, Lisa Huang, Yatharth Saraf, Relevance Ranking for Realtime Tweet Search, CIKM, accepted, 2020.

  • Xinting Huang, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Sun, Rui Zhang, Semi-Supervised Dialogue Policy Learning via Stochastic Reward Estimation, ACL, 660--670, 2020. PDF  BibTex

  • Xinting Huang, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Sun, Rui Zhang, MALA: Cross-Domain Dialogue Generation with Action Learning, AAAI, 7977-7984, 2020. PDF  BibTex

  • Hongfei Xu, Yu Gu, Yu Sun, Jianzhong Qi, Ge Yu, Rui Zhang, Efficient Processing of Moving Collective Spatial Keyword Queries, International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (VLDBJ), 29(4): 841–865, 2019. PDF  BibTex

  • Xiaojie Wang, Rui Zhang, Yu Sun, Jianzhong Qi, Adversarial Distillation for Learning with Privileged Provisions, Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), accepted, 2019. PDF  BibTex

  • Xiaojie Wang, Rui Zhang, Yu Sun, Jianzhong Qi, Doubly Robust Joint Learning for Recommendation on Data Missing Not at Random, ICML, 6638-6647, 2019. PDF  BibTex

  • Xinting Huang, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Sun, Rui Zhang, Hai-Tao Zheng, CARL: Aggregated Search with Context-Aware Module Embedding Learning, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 1-8, 2019. PDF   BibTex

  • Yu Sun, Lluis Garcia-Pueyo, James Wendt, Marc Najork, Andrei Broder, Learning Effective Embeddings for Machine Generated Emails with Applications to Email Category Prediction, IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 1846-1855, 2018. PDF  BibTex

  • Xiaojie Wang, Rui Zhang, Yu Sun, Jianzhong Qi, KDGAN: Knowledge Distillation with Generative Adversarial Networks, NeurIPS, 783-794, 2018. PDF  BibTex

  • Chuandong Yin, Rui Zhang, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Sun, Tenglun Tan, Context Uncertainty Aware Chatbot Action Selection via Parameterized Auxiliary Reinforcement Learning, PAKDD, 500-512, 2018. PDF  BibTex

  • Xiaojie Wang, Jianzhong Qi, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, Yu Sun, Bo Li, Rui Zhang, A Joint Optimization Approach for Personalized Recommendation Diversification, PAKDD, 597-609, 2018. PDF  BibTex

  • Yingzi Wang, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Yu Sun, Chuan Qin, Xing Xie, Enhong Chen, App Download Forecasting: An Evolutionary Hierarchical Competition Approach, IJCAI, 2978-2984, 2017. PDF  BibTex

  • Yu Sun, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Xing Xie, Kieran McDonald, Rui Zhang, Collaborative Intent Prediction with Real-Time Contextual Data, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 35(4): 30:1-30:33, 2017. PDF  BibTex

  • Yingzi Wang, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Yu Sun, Fuzheng Zhang, Xing Xie, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen, A Contextual Collaborative Approach for App Usage Forecasting, UbiComp, 1247–1258, 2016. PDF  BibTex

  • Yu Sun, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Yingzi Wang, Xing Xie, Kieran McDonald, Rui Zhang, Contextual Intent Tracking for Personal Assistants, KDD, 273–282, 2016. (Best Student Paper Award)  PDF  Video  BibTex

  • Yu Sun, Rui Zhang, Andy Yuan Xue, Jianzhong Qi, Xiaoyong Du, Reverse Nearest Neighbor Heat Maps: A Tool for Influence Exploration, ICDE, 966-977, 2016. PDF  BibTex  Slides  Poster  Heatmaps for various cities

  • Yu Sun, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Xing Xie, Kieran McDonald, Rui Zhang, Collaborative Nowcasting for Contextual Recommendation, WWW, 1407-1418, 2016. PDF  BibTex  Slides  Code

  • Yu Sun, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Zheng, Rui Zhang, K-Nearest Neighbor Temporal Aggregate Queries, EDBT, 493-504, 2015. PDF  BibTex  Slides  Code

  • Yu Sun, Jianzhong Qi, Rui Zhang, Yueguo Chen, Xiaoyong Du, MapReduce Based Location Selection Algorithm for Utility Maximization with Capacity Constraints, Computing, 97(4): 403-423, 2015. PDF  BibTex

  • Yu Sun, Jin Huang, Yueguo Chen, Rui Zhang, Xiaoyong Du, Location Selection for Utility Maximization with Capacity Constraints, CIKM, 2154-2158, 2012. PDF  BibTex  Poster

  • Yu Sun, Jin Huang, Yueguo Chen, Xiaoyong Du, Rui Zhang, Top-k Most Incremental Location Selection with Capacity Constraint, WAIM, 165-171, 2012. PDF  BibTex  Slides

  • Qiuyue Wang, Yantao Gan, Yu Sun, RUC @ INEX 2011 Data-Centric Track, INEX, 167-179, 2011. PDF  BibTex

Awards & Teaching


  • Victoria University Research Impact Award, Semi Finalist, Victorian Young Achiever Awards, 2017

  • Best Student Paper Award (Applied Data Science), The 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’16), 2016

  • International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) of Australia (~35 prizewinners per year in the University of Melbourne), 2013-2016

  • Australian Postgraduate Award, 2013-2016

  • KDD/ICDE/WWW Student Travel Awards, 2016

  • Google PhD Travel Scholarships, 2015, 2016

  • Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship, 2015, 2016.



  • 2016 Semester 1: Teaching Assistant (head), COMP90050 Advanced Database Systems

  • 2016 Semester 1: Lab Demonstrator, COMP90041 Programming and Software Development

  • 2014 Semester 2: Teaching Assistant (head), COMP90038 Algorithms and Complexity

  • 2014 Semester 1: Teaching Assistant, COMP90038 Algorithms and Complexity

  • 2013 Semester 2: Marking Assistant, COMP90038 Algorithms and Complexity

SOFTWARE


  • FuelPriceShare: Find nearby fuel stations and competitive fuel prices   Demo  Server-Code  Mobile-Code

  • GraphPart: Partition a graph (e.g., road networks) with natural cuts   Demo  Code

  • TrejShow: Print trajectories on a map for better visualization and comparison   Demo  Code

  • Route: Reconstruct a trajectory with the shortest route between uniformly sampled data points   Demo  Code

Professional Services


  • Workshop Organizer: Integrity in Social Networks and Media 2020 at WSDM

  • PC Member: AAAI 2019, NeurIPS 2019, AAAI 2020, ICML 2020, NeurIPS 2020,

  • Editorial Review Board Member: International Journal of Knowledge Management

  • Journal Reviewer: Distributed and Parallel Databases, The VLDB Journal, GeoInformatica, Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Journal of Systems and Software

  • External Reviewer: AAAI 2018, CIKM 2018, MM 2018, IT-ASONAM 2018, WAIM 2018, IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2017, WWW 2017, AAAI 2017, UbiComp 2016, IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2016, KDD 2016, IJCAI 2016, WWW 2016, SDM 2016, MDM 2016, WAIM 2016, SIGMOD 2015, SSTD 2015, ApWeb 2015, UrbComp 2015, CCF Big Data 2015, DASFAA 2013