Professor Jimmy Huang, who has been serving the School of Information Technology over 20 years, have been selected as a 2024 York University Research Award Winner for being named a Tier 1 York Research Chair in Big Data Analytics.
His primary research focuses on developing next-generation information retrieval techniques for a variety of information search applications. His work has been largely involved in extracting knowledge via automatically searching and analyzing big textual, medical and social media data.
I would like to express my gratitude to my wonderful students, postdocs, and collaborators for their contributions to this recognition.
– Professor Jimmy Huang
Professor Enamul Hoque Prince, Director of the School of Information Technology, acknowledged this recognition as a “well-deserved achievement that acknowledges the exceptional quality and impact of Professor Huang’s research. It stands among his numerous accolades, both domestically and internationally, illustrating the high standard of scholarship and research accomplishment our faculty in the School of Information Technology aim for. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Professor Huang for this achievement!”
Professor Jimmy Huang’s Biography:
Prof. Huang holds Tier I York Research Chair Professorship in big data analytics. His major research focuses on the areas of information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing and big data analytics with complex structures and their applications to the Web and medical healthcare. He has published more than 320 refereed papers, several of which received best paper awards, in top-tier journals (such as ACM Transactions on Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM Computing Surveys, Information Sciences, Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Journal of Computers in Biology and Medicine, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Medical Genomics and BMC Genomics) and premier & major conferences in the fields (such as ACM SIGIR, ACM CIKM, ACM SIGKDD, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, IJCAI & AAAI). His proposed task-oriented and context-sensitive information retrieval research, which has been sponsored by his NSERC Discovery Grant, has brought remarkable impacts and led to some promising research (such as conversational search, ChatGPT and BERT-related). The outcome of his research had significant impacts on both academia and industry. His paper “Hypergraph contrastive collaborative filtering” published in ACM SIGIR 2022 was selected as the most influential SIGIR papers in 2023. He was the General Conference Chair for the 19th International ACM CIKM Conference, the Program Chair for IEEE/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence & Intelligent Agent Technology in 2010 and the General Conference Chair for the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference in 2020. He has been the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics (TCII) since 2023.
Jimmy Huang joined York University as an Assistant Professor in July 2003. Previously, he was a Post- Doctoral Fellow at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. He did his Ph.D. in Information Science at City, University of London, U.K. He was awarded tenure and promoted to Full Professor in 2006 and 2011 respectively. He also served as steering committee members of review and adjudication panels for Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Canada Research Chair (CRC), Industrial Research Chair (IRC), MRI Early Researcher Awards Program and National Science Foundation (NSF) of USA. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator (PI) of an NSERC Discovery Grant ($384,000 CAD for 6 years starting from 2020). He was also the Principal Investigator (PI) of an NSERC CREATE program in Computational Approaches for Advanced Disaster, Emergency and Rapid-response Simulation (ADERSIM) with $1,650,000 for 6 years starting from 2015, a Co-PI of an ORF-RE Grant ($3,544,220 CAD for 5 years starting from 2015), an ORF-Large Infrastructure Grant ($1,450,000 CAD for 5 years starting from 2015), a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant ($200,000 CAD for 2 years starting from 2015) and three NSERC CRD Grants ($807,500 CAD in total for 3 years). He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and a Founding Fellow of Web Intelligence Academy (FWIA). He received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research in 2006, an Early Researcher Award, formerly the Premier’s Research Excellence Awards in 2007, the Petro Canada Young Innovators Award in 2008, the SHARCNET Research Fellowship Award in 2009, the Best Paper Award at the 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval in 2010 and York University LA&PS Award for Distinction in Research, Creativity and Scholarship (Established Researcher) in 2015.