Professor Hongzhi Yin
Professor

Hongzhi Yin

Email: 
Phone: 
+61 7 336 54739

Background

Prof. Hongzhi Yin works as an ARC Future Fellow and Professor and director of the Responsible Big Data Intelligence Lab (RBDI) at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has made notable contributions to recommendation systems, structured foundation model, spatial-temporal prediction, LLM and ChatBI, and decentralized and edge intelligence. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his research achievements. He has been named to IEEE Computer Society’s AI’s 10 to Watch 2022 and Field Leader of Data Mining & Analysis in The Australian's Research 2020 magazine. In addition, he has received the prestigious 2023 Young Tall Poppy Science Awards, Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 2021, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2016, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award 2019, 2024 and 2025 Computer Science in Australia Leader Award, AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Data Mining (2022-2025), 2024 and 2025 ScholarGPS Highly Ranked Scholar (top 0.05%). His research has won 8 international and national Best Paper Awards, including Best Student Full Paper Award at CIKM 2024, Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention at WSDM 2023, Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, Best Student Paper Award at DASFAA 2020, Best Paper Award Nomination at ICDM 2018, ACM Computing Reviews' 21 Annual Best of Computing Notable Books and Articles, Best Paper Award at ADC 2018 and 2016. His Ph.D. thesis won Peking University Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2014 and CCF Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award (Nomination) 2014. He has ten conference papers recognized as the Most Influential Papers in Paper Digest, including KDD 2021 and 2013, AAAI 2021, SIGIR 2022, WWW 2023 and 2021, CIKM 2021, 2019, 2016, and 2015. He has published 400 papers with an H-index of 91 (29000+ citations), including 290+ CCF A/CORE A* and 90+ CCF B/CORE A, such as ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, KDD, SIGIR, WWW, ACL, WSDM, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, AAAI, IJCAI, ACM Multimedia, ECCV, IEEE TKDE, TNNL, VLDB Journal, and ACM TOIS. He has been the leading author (first/co-first author or corresponding author) for 300. He has been an SPC/PC member for many top conferences, such as AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, VLDB, ICDE, ICDM, and CIKM. He has been serving as Associate Editor/Guest Editor/Editorial Board for Neural Networks (JCR Q1, CCF B, 中科院一区), Science China Information Sciences (JCR Q1, CCF A, 中科院一区), Data Science and Engineering (JCR Q1, 中科院一区), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST, CCF B), Journal of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2022-2023 (JCR Q1, CCF A, CORE A, 中科院一区), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2020-2021 (JCR Q1), Information Systems 2020-2021 (CORE A*), and World Wide Web 2020-2021 and 2017-2018 (CORE A, CCF B). Dr. Yin has also been attracting wide media coverage, such as The Australian, SBS Radio Interviews, UQ News, Sohu.com, Faculty News of EAIT, IEEE Computer Society, ACM Computing Reviews.

I am now looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students. The University of Queensland ranks in the top 50 as measured by the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The University also ranks 40 in the QS World University Rankings and 41 in the US News Best Global Universities Rankings. The University of Queensland is the best in Australia according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), which has now ranked UQ in the #1 position for 2 consecutive years. Please find the following three PhD scholarships.

Latest News

  1. [20 May 2026] Our ARC Linkage Project 2025 "AI-Powered Design Co-Pilot for Reimagining Australian Single-Family Homes" has been successfully granted and funded.

  2. [16 May 2026] We have three research papers accepted by the top conference KDD 2026 Research Track (CORE A*, CCF A, Acceptance Rate ~18%).

  3. [12 May 2026] I have been recognised in 2026 Edition of Best Scientists in the field of Computer Science and ranked 42 in Australia on Research.com, a leading academic platform.

  4. [8 May 2026] Our research paper "Efficient Prompt Learning for Traffic Forecasting" has been accepted by VLDB Journal (CORE A*, CCF A)

  5. [3 April 2026] We have 3 research papers accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2026.

    • Prompt-Unknown Promotion Attacks against LLM-based Sequential Recommender Systems

    • ProMax: Exploring the Potential of LLM-derived Profiles with Distribution Shaping for Recommender Systems

    • ProEchoMem: Enhancing Long Video Understanding via Multi-Trace Probe-Echo Memory

  6. [27 March 2026] We have successfully secured the opportunity to host the top-tier conference ICDM 2027 in Brisbane.

  7. [24 Feb 2026] We have 3 research papers on ChatBI accepted by the top conferences ICLR 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A) and ICDE 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A).

  8. [21 Feb 2026] I’m pleased to join the Organizing Committee of the premier conference WSDM 2027 as the Conference Awards Co-Chair.

  9. [18 Feb 2026] I’m pleased to join the Organizing Committee of the data mining flagship conference ADMA 2026 as the PC Co-Chair.

  10. [5 Feb 2026] We are organizing a workshop "LLM-UP: LLM-powered User Profiling for Search and Recommendation" at SIGIR 2026.

  11. [26 January 2026] We have 3 papers accepted by the top conference ICLR 2026 (CORE A*).

  12. [20 January 2026] I was invited to serve as Area Chair in the top conference KDD 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A), IJCAI 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A), ARR-ACL 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A) and ICDM 2026 (CORE A*, CCF B).

  13. [14 January] We have two research papers accepted by the top conference WWW 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A). Congratulations to Xinyi and Hung.

  14. [13 January 2025] We have two research papers recognized as ESI Hot Papers and five research papers recognized as ESI Highly Cited Papers.

  15. [19 December 2025] I was invited to serve as Area Chair in the top conference SIGIR 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A) and senior PC member at the top conference ICMR 2026 (CORE A, CCF B).

  16. [9 December 2025] I have been recognized as 2025 ScholarGPS Highly Ranked Scholar (top 0.05% of all scholars), #3 in Data Mining, #8 in Information Engineering.

  17. [8 November 2025] Our research paper "SmartAgent: Chain-of-User-Thought for Embodied Personalized Agent in Cyber World" was accepted by the top conference AAAI 2026 (CCF A and CORE A*). Congratulations to Jiaqi.

  18. [4 November 2025] We have released the first survey on Reasoning-Aware Recommender Systems in the LLM Era.

  19. [28 October 2025] My ARC Discovery Project 2026 "Advancing Federated Learning for Unified Urban Spatio-Temporal Predictions" has been successfully granted and funded.

  20. [13 October 2025] I was invited to be Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR).

  21. [1 October 2025] I have been recognised in the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientists List Career Long (2022-2025) and Single Year (2020-2025).

Availability

Professor Hongzhi Yin is:
Available for supervision

Qualifications

  • Postgraduate Diploma, Peking University
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Peking University

Research interests

  • Structured Foundation Model

  • Spatial-temporal Prediction

  • LLM and ChatBI

  • Recommender System and User Modeling

  • Edge Machine Learning and Applications

  • Time Series and Sequence Mining and Prediction

  • Trustworthy Machine Learning and Applications

Research impacts

Prof. Yin is currently directing the Responsible Big Data Intelligence Lab (RBDI). RBDI Lab aims and strives to develop decentralized, on-device, and trustworthy (e.g., privacy-preserving, robust, explainable and fair) data mining and machine learning techniques with theoretical backbones to better discover actionable patterns and intelligence from large-scale, heterogeneous, networked, dynamic and sparse data. RBDI joins forces with other fields such as urban transportation, healthcare, agriculture, E-commerce and marketing to help solve societal, environmental and economic challenges facing humanity in pursuit of a sustainable future. His research has also attracted media coverage, such as The Australian, SBS, UQ News, Faculty News of EAIT, ACM Computing Reviews, 360 News.

Search Professor Hongzhi Yin’s works on UQ eSpace

425 works between 2011 and 2026
All (425) Book (2) Journal Article (170) Edited Outputs (6) Conference Publication (243) Book Chapter (4)

401 - 420 of 425 works

2016

Book

Spatio-temporal recommendation in social media

Yin, Hongzhi and Cui, Bin (2016). Spatio-temporal recommendation in social media. Singapore: Springer Singapore. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-0748-4

Spatio-temporal recommendation in social media

2016

Conference Publication

Discovering interpretable geo-social communities for user behavior prediction

Yin, Hongzhi, Hu, Zhiting, Zhou, Xiaofang, Wang, Hao, Zheng, Kai, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen and Sadiq, Shazia (2016). Discovering interpretable geo-social communities for user behavior prediction. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Helsinki, Finland, 16-20 May 2016. Washington, DC United States: IEEE Computer Society. doi: 10.1109/ICDE.2016.7498303

Discovering interpretable geo-social communities for user behavior prediction

2016

Conference Publication

Learning graph-based POI embedding for location-based recommendation

Xie, Min, Yin, Hongzhi, Wang, Hao, Xu, Fanjiang, Chen, Weitong and Wang, Sen (2016). Learning graph-based POI embedding for location-based recommendation. 25th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2016, Indianapolis, IN, United States, 24 - 28 October 2016. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/2983323.2983711

Learning graph-based POI embedding for location-based recommendation

2016

Conference Publication

SPORE: a sequential personalized spatial item recommender system

Wang, Weiqing, Yin, Hongzhi, Sadiq, Shazia, Chen, Ling, Xie, Min and Zhou, Xiaofang (2016). SPORE: a sequential personalized spatial item recommender system. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Helsinki, Finland, 16-20 May 2016. Washington, DC, United States: IEEE Computer Society. doi: 10.1109/ICDE.2016.7498304

SPORE: a sequential personalized spatial item recommender system

2016

Conference Publication

Keyword-aware continuous kNN query on road networks

Zheng, Bolong, Zheng, Kai, Xiao, Xiaokui, Su, Han, Yin, Hongzhi, Zhou, Xiaofang and Li, Guohui (2016). Keyword-aware continuous kNN query on road networks. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Helsinki, Finland, 16-20 May 2016. Washington, DC United States: IEEE Computer Society. doi: 10.1109/ICDE.2016.7498297

Keyword-aware continuous kNN query on road networks

2016

Conference Publication

A unified framework for fine-grained opinion mining from online reviews

Wang, Hao, Zhang, Chen, Yin, Hongzhi, Wang, Wei, Zhang, Jun and Xu, Fanjiang (2016). A unified framework for fine-grained opinion mining from online reviews. 49th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2016, Koloa, HI, 5-8 January 2016. Piscataway, NJ, United States: I E E E. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2016.144

A unified framework for fine-grained opinion mining from online reviews

2016

Conference Publication

Using detected visual objects to index video database

Du, Xingzhong, Yin, Hongzhi, Huang, Zi, Yang, Yi and Zhou, Xiaofang (2016). Using detected visual objects to index video database. Australasian Database Conference on Databases Theory and Applications, Sydney, Australia, 28-29 September 2016. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-46922-5_26

Using detected visual objects to index video database

2015

Journal Article

Modeling location-based user rating profiles for personalized recommendation

Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Chen, Ling, Hu, Zhiting and Zhang, Chengqi (2015). Modeling location-based user rating profiles for personalized recommendation. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, 9 (3) 19, 19:1-19:41. doi: 10.1145/2663356

Modeling location-based user rating profiles for personalized recommendation

2015

Journal Article

Dynamic user modeling in social media systems

Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Chen, Ling, Hu, Zhiting and Zhou, Xiaofang (2015). Dynamic user modeling in social media systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 33 (3) 10, 10:1-10:44. doi: 10.1145/2699670

Dynamic user modeling in social media systems

2015

Journal Article

Distinguishing re-sharing behaviors from re-creating behaviors in information diffusion

Xie, Yiran, Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Yao, Junjie and Xu, Quanqing (2015). Distinguishing re-sharing behaviors from re-creating behaviors in information diffusion. World Wide Web, 19 (6), 1-28. doi: 10.1007/s11280-015-0379-4

Distinguishing re-sharing behaviors from re-creating behaviors in information diffusion

2015

Conference Publication

Joint modeling of users' interests and mobility patterns for point-of-interest recommendation

Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Huang, Zi, Wang, Weiqing, Wu, Xian and Zhou, Xiaofang (2015). Joint modeling of users' interests and mobility patterns for point-of-interest recommendation. 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia, MM 2015, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, 26-30 October, 2015. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. doi: 10.1145/2733373.2806339

Joint modeling of users' interests and mobility patterns for point-of-interest recommendation

2015

Conference Publication

Predicting passengers in public transportation using smart card data

Dou, Mengyu, He, Tieke, Yin, Hongzhi, Zhou, Xiaofang, Chen, Zhenyu and Luo, Bin (2015). Predicting passengers in public transportation using smart card data. 26th Australasian Database Conference (ADC), Melbourne Australia, 4-7 June 2015. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-19548-3_3

Predicting passengers in public transportation using smart card data

2015

Conference Publication

Geo-SAGE: a geographical sparse additive generative model for spatial item recommendation

Wang, Weiqing, Yin, Hongzhi, Chen, Ling, Sun, Yizhou, Sadiq, Shazia and Zhou, Xiaofang (2015). Geo-SAGE: a geographical sparse additive generative model for spatial item recommendation. ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 10-13 August 2015. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/2783258.2783335

Geo-SAGE: a geographical sparse additive generative model for spatial item recommendation

2015

Conference Publication

Joint modeling of user check-in behaviors for point-of-interest recommendation

Yin, Hongzhi, Zhou, Xiaofang, Shao, Yingxia, Wang, Hao and Sadiq, Shazia (2015). Joint modeling of user check-in behaviors for point-of-interest recommendation. 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2015, Melbourme, VIC, Australia, 19-23 October, 2015. New York , NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/2806416.2806500

Joint modeling of user check-in behaviors for point-of-interest recommendation

2015

Conference Publication

Predicting users' purchasing behaviors using their browsing history

He, Tieke, Yin, Hongzhi, Chen, Zhenyu, Zhou, Xiaofang and Luo, Bin (2015). Predicting users' purchasing behaviors using their browsing history. 26th Australasian Database Conference (ADC), Melbourne, Australia, 4-7 June 2015. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-19548-3_11

Predicting users' purchasing behaviors using their browsing history

2015

Conference Publication

Geographical constraint and temporal similarity modeling for point-of-interest recommendation

Wu, Huimin, Shao, Jie, Yin, Hongzhi, Shen, Heng Tao and Zhou, Xiaofang (2015). Geographical constraint and temporal similarity modeling for point-of-interest recommendation. International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, Miami, FL, United States, 1-3 November 2015. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-26187-4_40

Geographical constraint and temporal similarity modeling for point-of-interest recommendation

2015

Conference Publication

Distinguishing re-sharing behaviors from re-creating behaviors in information diffusion

Xie, Yiran, Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Yao, Junjie and Xu, Quanqing (2015). Distinguishing re-sharing behaviors from re-creating behaviors in information diffusion. 31st IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops 2015, Seoul, South Korea, 13-17 April 2015. IEEE Computer Society. doi: 10.1109/ICDEW.2015.7129573

Distinguishing re-sharing behaviors from re-creating behaviors in information diffusion

2015

Conference Publication

Discovering Organized POI Groups in a city

Xu, Yanxia, Liu, Guanfeng, Yin, Hongzhi, Xu, Jiajie, Zheng, Kai and Zhao, Lei (2015). Discovering Organized POI Groups in a city. 20th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), Hanoi, Vietnam, 20-23 April 2015. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer International Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-22324-7_19

Discovering Organized POI Groups in a city

2014

Journal Article

LCARS: A spatial item recommender system

Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Sun, Yizhou, Hu, Zhiting and Chen, Ling (2014). LCARS: A spatial item recommender system. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 32 (3) 11, 11-11. doi: 10.1145/2629461

LCARS: A spatial item recommender system

2014

Conference Publication

A temporal context-aware model for user behavior modeling in social media systems

Yin, Hongzhi, Cui, Bin, Chen, Ling, Hu, Zhiting and Huang, Zi (2014). A temporal context-aware model for user behavior modeling in social media systems. 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2014, Snowbird, UT United States, 22-27 June 2014. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/2588555.2593685

A temporal context-aware model for user behavior modeling in social media systems

Current funding

  • 2026 - 2029
    Advancing Federated Learning for Unified Urban Spatio-Temporal Predictions
    ARC Discovery Projects
    Open grant
  • 2025 - 2028
    Revolutionise Australian Strata Management with Large Language Models
    ARC Linkage Projects
    Open grant
  • 2025 - 2028
    Building an Aussie Information Recommendation System You Can Trust
    ARC Linkage Projects
    Open grant
  • 2024 - 2027
    Privacy-Aware and Personalised Explanation Overlays for Recommender Systems (ARC Discovery Project administered by Griffith University)
    ARC Discovery Projects
    Open grant
  • 2022 - 2026
    Decentralised Collaborative Predictive Analytics on Personal Smart Devices
    ARC Future Fellowships
    Open grant
  • 2021 - 2026
    ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience
    ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centres
    Open grant

Past funding

  • 2022 - 2023
    A Secured Smart Sensing and Industry Analytics Facility for Industry 4.0 (ARC LIEF application led by University of Technology Sydney)
    University of Technology Sydney
    Open grant
  • 2020 - 2021
    Developing a Privacy-Preserving and Energy-Efficient Mobile Recommender System Architecture
    UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards
    Open grant
  • 2019 - 2024
    Challenging Big Data for Scalable, Robust and Real-time Recommendations
    ARC Discovery Projects
    Open grant
  • 2017 - 2020
    Monitoring Social Events for User Online Behaviour Analytics
    ARC Discovery Projects
    Open grant
  • 2016 - 2018
    Mobile User Modeling for Intelligent Recommendation
    ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award
    Open grant

Availability

Professor Hongzhi Yin is:
Available for supervision

Looking for a supervisor? Read our advice on how to choose a supervisor.

Available projects

  • Building an Trustworthy Information Recommendation System

    Build a trustworthy information recommender system by spearheading the design and development of cutting-edge LLM4Rec techniques, misinformation filters, and privacy protection mechanisms.

    This Earmarked Scholarship project is aligned with a recently awarded Category 1 research grant. It offers you the opportunity to work with leading researchers and contribute to large projects of national significance.

Supervision history

Current supervision

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Revolutionise Australian Strata Management with Large Language Models

    Principal Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Decentralised Collaborative Predictive Analytics on Personal Smart Devices

    Principal Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    LLM-enhanced Recommender System

    Principal Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Reliable Multimodal Recommender Systems

    Principal Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Chain-of-User-Thought for Personalized Agent in Cyber World

    Principal Advisor

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Scalable and Lightweight On-Device Recommender Systems

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Scalable and Generalizable Graph Neural Networks

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Sustainable On-Device Recommender Systems

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Lightweight Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Scalable and Lightweight On-Device Recommender Systems

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Rocky Chen

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Robustness Verification of Neural Network

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Dr Naipeng Dong

  • Doctor Philosophy

    Integrated high-throughput material synthesis and characterisation system

    Associate Advisor

    Other advisors: Associate Professor Jingwei Hou

Completed supervision

Enquiries

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