Jian Tang earns Amazon Research Award
July 8, 2020
Assistant Professor Jian Tang has been awarded an Amazon Faculty Research Award, one of the world’s most sought-after faculty awards in computer science.
This year’s 51 laureates represent 39 universities in 10 countries. Many of the recipients hail from prestigious universities such as MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Cambridge. Jian Tang is the only Canadian representative who made the list.
The award program offers up to US$80,000 in grants and US$20,000 in Amazon Web Services Promotional Credits. The grants are intended to support the work of one to two graduate or postdoctoral students for one year, under the supervision of a faculty member.
Jian Tang and his research team are receiving this funding for their project “Deep Active Learning for Graph Neural Networks.”
The topic falls into one of the 11 focus areas identified by Amazon for this year’s awards:
- Computer vision
- Fairness in artificial intelligence
- Knowledge management and data quality
- Machine learning algorithms and theory
- Natural language processing
- Online advertising
- Operations research and optimization
- Personalization
- Robotics
- Search and information retrieval
- Security, privacy and abuse prevention
According to Amazon, the goal of the award program is to fund innovative and outstanding research proposals, in addition to “helping strengthen connections between Amazon research teams, academic researchers, and their affiliated institutions.”
About Jian Tang
Jian Tang holds a PhD in Computer Science from Peking University. In 2017, he joined HEC Montreal’s Department of Decision Science. He is also a faculty member of the Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). In 2018, he was appointed to a Canada CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
His work focuses on deep learning and reinforcement learning for graph-structured data with a variety of applications including social network analysis, recommender systems, natural-language understanding, knowledge graphs and drug discovery.
Before joining the School, Jian Tang was a research fellow at the University of Michigan and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his academic career, he worked for two years as a researcher for Microsoft Research Asia.
