Hi, thank you for visiting. I am a researcher and an associate professor in Osaka University. My research interests include web mining, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and latent variable models. Particularly, I am currently working on 1) user intent disentanglement in e-commerce platforms, a branch of recommendation system research, 2) political information modeling in social media data.

I obtained my PhD in computer science from the University of Adelaide in 2016, supervised by Dr. Claudia Szabo and Prof. Michael Sheng. Before joining Osaka University, I worked as a postdoc in Nanyang Technological University and Kyoto University. I publish my research in prestigious journals and conferences, such as ACM TKDD, ACM TIST, ACM TWEB, KAIS, KBS, WWWJ, ASONAM, PAKDD, ECIR, IJCNN, and WISE. I won the best paper award in KSEM 2021. I serve as program committee member in conferences such as CIKM and BigData.

If you are a student and interested in joining our lab, please feel free to contact me.

Short Biography

2024 - Now: Associate Professor in Osaka University, Japan
2021 - 2024: Specially Appointed Lecturer in Osaka University, Japan
2019 - 2021: Specially Appointed Researcher in Osaka University, Japan
2017 - 2019: Specially Appointed Researcher in Kyoto University, Japan
2016 - 2017: Research fellow in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2013 - 2016: Ph.D. student in Computer Science, the University of Adelaide, Australia
2011 - 2012: Master student in Computer Science, the University of Adelaide, Australia
2003 - 2010: Bachelor student in Computer Science, University of New South Wales, Australia

Publications

[Full Publication List] [My DBLP Page] [My Google Scholar Page]

Codes and data for some papers are available.

Selected Publications

• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2024: Extracting Political Interest Model from Interaction Data Based on Novel Word-level Bias Assignment. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. (accepted) [code]
• Yihong Zhang, Masumi Shirakawa, and Takahiro Hara, 2024: Word-Level Political Sentiments Inferred from Social Media and Application in Recommendation Diversification. ACM Transactions on the Web. (accepted) [political sentiment dictionary]
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2024: Event Embedding Learning from Social Media Using Graph Topic Model Autoencoder. The 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining ASONAM 2024, Calabria, Italy. (accepted)
• Zhi Li, Daichi Amagata, Yihong Zhang, Takahiro Hara, Shuichiro Haruta, Kei Yonekawa and Mori Kurokawa, 2024: Mutual Information-based Preference Disentangling and Transferring for Non-overlapped Multi-target Cross-domain Recommendations. The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval SIGIR 2024, Washington D.C., USA. (accepted)
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2024: Joint Knowledge Graph Approach for Event Participant Prediction with Social Media Retweeting. Knowledge and Information Systems. Springer. Volume 66(3), pp. 2115-2133.
• Panote Siriaraya, Yihong Zhang, Péter Jeszenszky, Yukiko Kawai, and Adam Jatowt, 2023: A City-Wide Examination of Fine-Grained Human Emotions through Social Media Analysis. PlOS ONE. PLOS. Volume 18(2), pp. e0279749.
• Yihong Zhang, Xiu Susie Fang, and Takahiro Hara, 2023: Evolving Social Media Background Representation with Frequency Weights and Co-occurrence Graphs. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. ACM. Volume 17(7), pp. 95:1-95:17.
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2023: Explainable Integration of Social Media Background in a Dynamic Neural Recommender. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. ACM. Volume 17(3), pp. 40:1-40:14.
• Yue Zhao, Yihong Zhang, Daichi Amagata, and Takahiro Hara, 2023: POI Recommendation by Learning Short-, Long- and Mid-Term Preferences through GNN. Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management MDM’23, Singapore, pp. 1-10.
• Zhi Li, Daichi Amagata, Yihong Zhang, Takuya Maekawa, Takahiro Hara, Kei Yonekawa, and Mori Kurokawa, 2022: HML4Rec: Hierarchical Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation in Flash Sale E-commerce. Knowledge-Based Systems. Elsevier. Volume 255, pp. 109674.
• Yihong Zhang, Masumi Shirakawa, and Takahiro Hara, 2021: An Automatic Method for Understanding Political Polarization through Social Media. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management KSEM 2021, Virtual Conference, pp. 52-63. (best paper winner)
• Panote Siriaraya, Yuanyuan Wang, Yihong Zhang, Shoko Wakamiya, Péter Jeszenszky, Yukiko Kawai, Adam Jatowt, 2020: Beyond the Shortest Route: A Survey on Quality-Aware Route Navigation for Pedestrians. IEEE Access. IEEE. Volume 8, pp. 135569-135590.
• Yihong Zhang, Panote Siriaraya, Yukiko Kawai, and Adam Jatowt, 2020: Predicting Time and Location of Future Crimes with Recommendation Methods. Knowledge-Based Systems. Elsevier. Volume 210, pp. 106503.
• Yihong Zhang, Panote Siriaraya, Yukiko Kawai, and Adam Jatowt, 2020: Automatic Latent Street Type Discovery from Web Open Data. Information Systems. Elsevier. Volume 92, pp. 101536. [pdf] [code and data]
• Yihong Zhang, Panote Siriaraya, Yukiko Kawai, and Adam Jatowt, 2020: Analysis of Street Crime Predictors in Web Open Data. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. Springer. Volume 55(3), pp. 535-559.
• Yihong Zhang and Adam Jatowt, 2019: Image Tweet Popularity Prediction with Convolutional Neural Network. Proceedings of the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval ECIR'19, Cologne, Germany, pp. 803-809.
• Yihong Zhang, Claudia Szabo, Quan Z. Sheng, and Xiu Susie Fang, 2018: SNAF: An Effective Location Inference and Event Monitoring System for Twitter. World Wide Web. Springer. Volume 21(2), 311-343.
• Yihong Zhang, Claudia Szabo, Quan Z. Sheng, Wei Emma Zhang and Yongrui Qin, 2017: Identifying Domains and Concepts in Short Texts via Partial Taxonomy and Unlabeled Data. Proceedings of The 29th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering CAiSE'17, Essen, Germany, pp. 127-143.
• Yihong Zhang, Claudia Szabo, and Quan Z. Sheng, 2016: Improved Object and Event Monitoring on Twitter Through Lexical Analysis and User Profiling. Proceedings of The 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering WISE'16 Part II, Shanghai, China, pp.19-34. (best paper candidate)
• Cheng Chang, Yihong Zhang, Claudia Szabo and Quan Z. Sheng, 2016: Extreme User and Political Rumor Detection on Twitter. Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications ADMA'16, Gold Coast, Australia, pp. 751-763.
• Yihong Zhang, Claudia Szabo, and Quan Z. Sheng, 2015: Sense and Focus: Towards Effective Location Inference and Event Detection on Twitter. Proceedings of The 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering WISE'15 Part I, Miami, USA, pp. 463-477.
• Yihong Zhang, Claudia Szabo, and Quan Z. Sheng, 2014: Cleaning Environmental Sensing Data Streams based on Individual Sensor Reliability. Proceedings of The 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering WISE'14, Part II, Thessaloniki, Greece, pp. 405-414.

Professional Services

[Full List of Professional Services]

Conference Organization

• 2025 The 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, PC member
• 2025 The 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, PC member
• 2025 The 19th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, PC member
• 2024 The 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, PC member
• 2024 The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, PC member
• 2024 The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, PC member

Journal Reviewer

• Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier)
• Knowledge and Information Systems (Springer)
• ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM)
• IEEE Transactions on Big Data (IEEE)
• World Wide Web (Springer)

Grants

2024-2025 Osaka University Graduate School of Information Science and Technology Start-up Program Grant JPY 500K for project Social Behavior Modeling and Governance in Online Shopping Platforms

2022-2023 Osaka University Graduate School of Information Science and Technology Start-up Program Grant JPY 500K for project Analyzing Social Media for Modeling Human Partition in Emerging Events

Personal

Hobbies: reading novel (especially modern Japanese novels), hiking, playing guitar and ukulele