About Me

Qian Zhao is a researcher and entrepreneur in the fields of recommender systems, NLP/AI and social computing.

Before embarking on his entrepreneurial journey, he was a senior research engineer and engineering team leader in Bloomberg's AI Engineering group, which then consists of 200+ researchers and engineers responsible for building financial solutions using technologies from Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Dialog Understanding, Graph Analytics, Time Series Analysis, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Speech Recognition, Computer Vision, and Optimization.

Qian earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the GroupLens lab at the University of Minnesota, where he was advised by Professor Joe Konstan. Qian's research interests lie broadly at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction (e.g., user-centered design and evaluation of online interactive recommender systems). Before that, he worked in industry in China for a few years, where he focused on large-scale data mining and machine learning systems for video recommendation and computational advertising products.

Recent News

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Professional Services

• 2025
  • Senior Program Committee member for RecSys 2025
• 2024
  • Senior Program Committee member for RecSys 2024
  • Program Committee member for RecSys 2024 Industry Track
• 2023
  • Senior Program Committee member for RecSys 2023
• 2022
  • Proceedings Co-Chair for RecSys 2022
• 2021
  • Program Committee member for TheWebConf 2022
  • Senior Program Committee member for RecSys 2021
  • Program Committee member for SIGIR 2021
• 2020
  • Program Committee member for SIGIR 2020
• 2019
  • Program Committee member for CSCW 2020 (as an Associate Chair)
  • Program Committee member for WSDM 2020, TheWebConf 2020, RecSys 2019
  • Reviewer for CSCW 2019, Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• 2018
  • Program Committee member for WSDM 2019 (recognized as an Outstanding PC member)
  • Reviewer for the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems
• 2017
  • Reviewer for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Springer
  • Reviewer for AAAI 2018, RecSys 2017, TVX 2017, IDC 2017
• 2016
  • Reviewer for RecSys 2016, CIKM 2016

Conference Attendence

• 9/2022 at RecSys'22
  • Invited keynote talk "AI and Recommender Systems for the Capital Markets" for the FinRec workshop.
• 7/2022 at NAACL'22
• 9/2021 at RecSys'21
• 9/2020 at RecSys'20
• 9/2019 at RecSys'19
  • Talk slides on "From Preference Into Decision Making: Modeling Interactions in Recommender Systems"
• 5/2019 at ICML'19
• 9/2018 at RecSys'18
  • Talk slides on "Interpreting User Inaction in Recommender Systems"
  • Talk slides on "Categorical-Attributes-Based Item Classification for Recommender Systems"
• 5/2018 at SIGIR'18
  • Talk slides on "Calendar-Aware Proactive Email Recommendation"
• ...