Microsoft Research
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Yu Zheng

 

 

Yu Zheng (郑宇)   Ph. D.

Lead Researcher, Project Lead  [ My LinkedIn ] [My Facebook] [My MicroBlog]

Data Management, Analytics and Services (DMAS)

Ubiquitous Computing Group (Ubicomp)

 

Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)  [My Curriculum Vitae] 

Building 2, No. 5 Danling Street, Haidian District, Beijing, P.R. China 100080

Email: yuzheng@microsoft.com, zhyu_swjtu@hotmail.com
Tel.: +86-10-59173038; Fax: +86-10-82868529 

Dr. Yu Zheng is a lead researcher from Microsoft Research Asia. He is an IEEE senior member, ACM senior member, and a Distinguished Speaker of China Computer Federation. His research interests include location-based services, spatio-temporal data mining, ubiquitous computing, and mobile social applications. He has published over 50 referred papers as a leading author at high-quality international conferences and journals, such as SIGMOD, SIGKDD, AAAI, ICDE, WWW, Ubicomp, IEEE TKDE, and ACM TWEB. These papers have been featured by top-tier presses like MIT Technology Review multiple times.  He has received 4 best paper awards from UIC’10, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS’11, ADMA'11, and ICDE'13 as well as 1 best paper nominee from Ubicomp’11. Additionally, he has a number of most cited papers, such as ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010 and IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (2010).  He has been serving over 30 prestigious international conferences as a chair or program committee member, including program co-chair of ICDE2014 (industrial track), program chair of LBSN2012, LBSN2011, UrbComp2012, demo chair of SSTD 2013, session chair of KDD2012, UbiComp2011, UIC2010, and industrial chair of UbiComp2012, etc.  He is also an editorial board of 4 international journals, such as GeoInformatica and Journal of Location Based Services, and a frequent invited speaker in conferences and leading universities like MIT, CMU, Cornell, and UIUC. So far, he has supervised over 30 visiting Ph.D. students from around the world. His book, titled “Computing with Spatial Trajectories”, has been used as a text book in USA, Canada, Australia, Korea, and China. He has received 3 technical transfer awards from Microsoft and 20 granted/filed patents. In 2008, he was recognized as the Microsoft Golden Star. He joined MSRA in July 2006 right after received his Ph.D. degree in communication & information systems from Southwest Jiaotong University.

Quality BS/MS/Ph.D. students interested in my research are welcomed to apply the MSRA internship by sending me their resumes.

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A new book "Computing with Spatial Trajectories" edited by Yu Zheng and Xiaofang Zhou has been published by Springer in November 2011. It is ready for order on Amazon and Springer.

 

"Computing with spatial trajectories is still a fairly young and dynamic research field. This book may serve researcher and application developers a comprehensive overview of the general concepts, techniques, and applications on trajectory indexing, search and data mining, and help them explore this exciting field and develop new methods and applications" - by Jiawen Han. 

 

    [Order it on Amazon]       [Buy it from Springer]        [ Preview this book (Outline and Slides) ]

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News

  • 2013.7.18: I am invited to give a keynote speech at the 9th IEEE International conf. on Intelligent Environment (IE 2013), Athen, Greece,New! 
  • 2013.4.10: Our paper, T-Share: A large scale dynamic ridesharing service, won the best paper runner-up award at ICDE 2013. New!
  • 2013.3.29: I am organizing the 2nd international workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp 2013) New!
  • I am invited to be the program co-chair of ICDE 2014 industrial track. New!
  • 2012.11.29: I will give an invited talk at Beijing urban planning institute.
  • 2012.11.21: I gave an invited talk in the colloquium of Shanghai Jiaotong Univerisity.   
  • 2012.11.15: I was invited to give a talk on urban computing in National Taiwan University.
  • 2012.9.17: I gave a guest lecture on urban computing in Cornell University. (Slides) 

More news ......

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Focused Research Themes

1) Urban Computing

2) Location-Based Social Networks

3) Computing with Spatial Trajectories

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Honors
  1. ACM Senior member, since Jan. 2012
  2. IEEE Senior member, since Oct. 2011
  3. Distinguished Speaker in China Computer Federation
  4. Microsoft Golden Star, 2008
  5. Best paper runner-up award at the 29th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013)
  6. Best paper award at the 7th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2011)
  7. Best paper award nominee at the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2011)
  8. Best paper runner-up award at ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010
  9. Best paper award at the 8th International conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2010)
  10. The most cited paper in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010
  11. The most cited paper in IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 2010
  12. The second most cited author in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS from 2008 to 2010
  13. Outstanding Ph.D. thesis award from Southwest Jiaotong University 2007

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Publications  (By Research Topics)(By Journals and Conferences)(Full List)

Books, Book Chapters and Proceedings

Selected  Papers

(Authors associated with * are/were the interns I have supervised in MSRA)
 
2013
 
2012 
 

2011

 2010

  2009 

2008 

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Selected Professional Activities (Complete List)

Chairs
  • Program co-chair of International Conference on Data Engineering (Industrial Track) (ICDE 2014)
  • Demo chair of Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Databases (SSTD 2013)
  • Program Chair of the 2nd International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp 2013)
  • Chair of CCF Advanced Disciplines Lectures (ADL) on Urban Computing (Details)
  • Session Chair of ACM SIGKDD conference onKnowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2012).
  • Industrial Chair of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012)
  • Program Chair of the 4th International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN 2012)
  • Program Chair of the International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp 2012)
  • Session Chair of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2011)
  • Program Co-Chair of the Third ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN 2011)
  • Local Chair of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2011)
  • Session Chair of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligences and Computing (UIC 2010)
  • Session Chair of the second ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN 2010)
  • Program Co-Chair of International Conference on Advances in Multimedia (MMEDIA 2009)

Program Committee
  • PC of ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2012) (KDD 2013)
  • PC of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2011)
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011)
  • PC of the Extending Database Technology 2012 (EDBT 2013)
  • PC of SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2013)
  • PC of the 6th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2013)
  • Senior PC of Asia-Pacific Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2012) (PAKDD 2013)
  • ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Geographic Information Systems (GIS 2013) (GIS 2011) (GIS 2010)
  • International Conference on Database Systems For Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2011)
  • International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2013/2012/2011/2010/2009)
  • International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2010)(MDM 2012)(MDM 2013) 
  • International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Database (SSTD 2011) (SSTD 2013)
  • Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2012) (ADC 2011) (ADC 2010)
  • IEEE international conference on Big Data (BigData 2013)
  • International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligences and Computing (UIC 2012) (UIC 2011) (UIC 2010)
  • International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Mutilmedia (MUM 2010) (MUM 2009) (MUM 2008)
  • International conference on Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services (MobiCASE 2011) (MobiCASE 2010)
  • International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2009) (WISE 2008)
  • International Symposium On Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA 2011)
  • International Conference on Information Systems, Technology and Management (ICISTM 2011)
  • International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions 2009 (ICITST-2009)
  • International Conference on the Next Generation Wireless System (NGWS 2009)
  • International Conference on Wireless Information Networks and Systems 2009 (Winsys 2009)
  • ACM Multimedia: Location-based and mobile multimedia Track (ACM MM 2011)
  • PC of International Conference on Advances in Multimedia (MMEDIA 2009)
  • International Conference on Advance of Computer Human Interaction (ACHI 2011) (ACHI 2009)
  • International conference on Intelligent User Interface (IUI 2009)
  • International Conference on Human Computer Interaction 2008 (HCI 2009) (HCI 2008)

Keynotes

  • Keynote speech at the 9th IEEE International conf. on Intelligent Environment (IE 2013), Athen, Greece, 2013.7.18
  • Keynote speech at the World Geospatial Developers Conference (WGDC 2013), 2013.5.15, Beijing, China (over 2,500 audiences)
  • Keynote speech at the China Annual Conference of GIS Theory and Methodology. 2012. Sept. Chengdu China.

Panelists

  • Early Career Panel, at Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Databases (SSTD 2011).
  • Mobile applications, Wireless China Industry Summit 2010
  • Location-Based Services, Wireless China Industry Summit 2009
  • Location-Based Services, Wireless China Industry Summit 2008

Editorial Boards, Editors, and Guest Editors

[Editorial boards] [Invited talks][Panels] [Media reports]

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Projects  (Full List)

Urban computing is emerging as a concept where every sensor, device, person, vehicle, building, and street in the urban areas can be used as a component to enable a city-wide computing for serving people and their cities. Urban computing aims to create a healthy eco-system that provides people with a better life in cities and a better city for life. 

GPS-equipped taxis can be regarded as mobile sensors probing traffic flows on road surfaces, and taxi drivers are usually experienced in finding the fastest (quickest) route to a destination based on their knowledge. In this project, we mine smart driving directions from the historical GPS trajectories of a large number of taxis, and provide a user with the practically fastest route to a given destination at a given departure time. We build our system based on a real world trajectory dataset generated by over 33,000 taxis in a period of 3 months, and evaluate the system by conducting both synthetic experiments and in-the-field evaluations. As a result, 60-70% of the routes suggested by our method are faster than the competing methods, and 20% of the routes share the same results. On average, 50% of our routes are at least 20% faster than the competing approaches.

GeoLife is a location-based social-networking service on Microsoft Virtual Earth. It enables users to share life experiences and build connections among each other using human location history. GeoLife enables user to share travel experience using GPS trajectories. By mining multiple users’ location histories, GeoLife can discover the top most interesting locations, classical travel sequences and travel experts in a given geospatial region, hence enable a generic travel recommendation. By understanding individual location history, GeoLife can measure the similarity between users and perform personalized friend & location recommendation.

  • Photo2Search: Searching maps using street-side photos

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 Awards

Best Paper Awards 

  • Best paper runner-up award at the 29th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013)
  • Best paper award at the 7th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2011)
  • Best paper award nominee at te 13th Inernational Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2011)
  • Best paper runner-up award at ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010
  • Best paper award at the 8th International confernce on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2010)
  • Outstanding Ph.D. thesis award from Southwest Jiaotong university 2007

Technical Transfer Awards

  • Merging location records. Shipped to Bing Local Search (Japan and China), Jan. 2010
  • A Chineses address breakor. Shipped to Bing Local Search (China). April, 2009.
  • Spatial outlier detection. Shipped to Bing Local Search (China). April. 2009

Patent Awards

  • MS 322848.01, "Learning Transportation Modes from Raw GPS Data", 2/26/2007. USPTO #20090216704, Class: 706 52
  • MS 322389.01, "System for logging life experiences using geographic cues", 2/26/2007. IPC8 Class: AG01C2134FI
    USPC Class: 701209
  • MS 322852.01, ASM 8110, "Indexing large-scale GPS tracks", 2/26/2007, IPC8 Class: AG06F700FI
    USPC Class: 707101
  • International Patent. MS 324938.01, "Determining User Similarities Based on Location Histories", 11/3/2008. US20100111372
  • US Patent. MS 325489.01, "Making Friend and Location Recommendations Based on Location Similarities", 12/8/2008
  • International Patent. MS 326249.01, "Detecting Spatial Outliers in a Location Entity Dataset", 1/14/2009
  • US Patent. MS 326004.01, "Identifying Interesting Locations", 2/20/2009
  • US Patent. MS 327345.01, "Search and Replay of Experiences", 5/27/2009
  • US Patent. MS 327344.01, "Location Context Based Calling", 6/3/2009
  • US Patent. MS 327346.01, "Nearby Contact Alert Based on Location and Context", 6/3/2009
  • US Patent. MS 327762.01 MS1-4846US, "Mining Life Pattern Based on Location History", 9/17/2009
  • US Patent. MS 327763.01, MS1-4847US, "Recommending Points of Interests in a Region", 9/28/2009
  • International Patent. MS 328341.01, MS1-4911US, "Route Computation Based on Route-Oriented Vehicle Trajectories", 12/28/2009
  • US Patent. MS328342.01, MS1-4909US, "Map-Matching for Low-Sampling-Rate GPS Trajectories", 12/30/2009
  • US Patent. MS328339.01, MS1-4913US, "Mining Correlation Between Locations Using Human Location History", 12/31/2009
  • US Patent. MS329247.01, MS1-4950US, "Collaborative Location and Activity Recommendations", 2010,4.15
  • US Patent. MS 329245.01, MS1-4949US, "Searching similar trajectories by locations". 4/23/2010
  • US Patent. MS 330719.01, "Prioritizing travel itineraries". 10/29/2010
  • US Patent. MS# 331672.01, "Inferring a behavior state of a vehicle", 5/19/2011
  • US/International Patent. 333873.01 / MS1-5200US, "Urban Computing of Route-Oriented Vehicles", 10/24/2011

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Data Released

This is a GPS trajectory dataset collected in (Microsoft Research Asia) GeoLife project by 182 users in a period of over two years (from April 2007 to August 2012). This trajectory dataset can be used in many research fields, such as mobility pattern mining, user activity recognition, location-based social networks, location privacy, and location recommendation. The following heat maps visualize its distribution in Beijing.

 

please cite the following two papers when using this dataset.

[1] Yu Zheng, Quannan Li, Yukun Chen, Xing Xie. Understanding Mobility Based on GPS Data. In Proceedings of ACM conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2008), Seoul, Korea. ACM Press: 312-321.

[2] Yu Zheng, Lizhu Zhang, Xing Xie, Wei-Ying Ma. Mining interesting locations and travel sequences from GPS trajectories. In Proceedings of International conference on World Wild Web (WWW 2009), Madrid Spain. ACM Press: 791-800.

This is a sample of T-Drive taxi trajectory dataset which was generated by over 10,000 taxis in a period of one week in Beijing.

Please cite the following two papers when using the dataset:

[1] Jing Yuan*, Yu Zheng, Chengyang Zhang, Wenlei Xie, Xing Xie, Guangzhong Sun, Yan Huang. T-Drive: Driving Directions Based on Taxi Trajectories. In Proceedings of ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference on Advances in Geographical Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010),

[2] Jing Yuan*, Yu Zheng, Xing Xie, Guangzhong Sun. Driving with Knowledge from the Physical World. accepted by 17th SIGKDD conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2011).

This is a portion of GPS trajectory dataset collected in (Microsoft Research Asia) GeoLife project. Each trajectory has a set of transportation mode labels, such as by driving, taking a bus, riding a bike and walking, which can support transportation mode learning.

Please cite the following three papers when using this GPS dataset.

[1] Yu Zheng, Like Liu, Longhao Wang, Xing Xie. Learning Transportation Mode from Raw GPS Data for Geographic Application on the Web, In Proceedings of International conference on World Wild Web (WWW 2008), Beijing, China. ACM Press: 247-256

[2] Yu Zheng, Quannan Li, Yukun Chen, Xing Xie. Understanding Mobility Based on GPS Data. In Proceedings of ACM conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2008), Seoul, Korea. ACM Press: 312-321.

[3] Yu Zheng, Yukun Chen, Quannan Li, Xing Xie, Wei-Ying Ma. Understanding transportation modes based on GPS data for Web applications. ACM Transaction on the Web. Volume 4, Issue 1, January, 2010. pp. 1-36.

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My Friends and Research Partners

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Selected Interns I have supervised

2013

  • Yexiang Xue. Ph.D. student @ Cornell University, USA
  • Hsun-Ping Hsie. Ph.D. student @ National Taiwan University
  • Ka Wai Yung. Ph.D. student @ University of Pittsburgh, USA

2012 

  • David Wilkie. Ph.D. student @ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
  • Bei Pan Ph.D. student @ University of Southern California, USA
  • Yanjie Fu Ph.D. student @ Rutgers university, USA
  • Shuo Ma Ph.D. candidate @ University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

2011

  • Kai Zheng Ph.D. candidate @ The University of Queensland, Australia
  • Xin Lu Ph.D. candidate @ MIT, USA.
  • Sakshi Babbar Ph.D. candidate @ University of Sydney, Australia
  • Bao Jie Ph.D. candidate @ University of Minnesota, USA
  • Lu-An Tang Ph.D. candidate @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Hechen Liu Ph.D. candidate @ University of Florida, USA
  • Ling-Ying Wei Ph.D. candidate @ National Jiaotong university of Taiwan

2010

  • Wei Liu Ph.D. candidate @ University of Sydney, Australia
  • Kai Zheng Ph.D. candidate @ The University of Queensland, Australia
  • Lu-An Tang Ph.D. candidate @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
  • Darshan Santani, Master candidate @ ETH, Zurich
  • Chih-Chieh Hung, Ph.D. candidate  @ Taiwan National Jiaotong University, Taiwan
  • Zhengqiang Gong, Ph.D. candidate  @ University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • Wenlei Xie, Ph.D. candidate @ Cornell University, USA

2009

  • Hyoseok Yoon, Ph.D. candidate @ GIST University, South Korea (Ph.D. Dissertation)
  • Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Ph.D. candidate  @ Hongkong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
  • Jing Yuan, Ph.D. candidate @ Univeristy of Science and Techology, China (Ph.D. Dissertation)
  • Zaiben Chen, Ph.D. candidate @ The University of Queensland, Australia
  • Xiangye Xiao, Ph.D. candidate @ Hongkong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
  • Sheng Chang, Ph.D. candidate @ National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • Chengyang Zhang, Ph.D. candidate @ University of North Texas, USA
  • Yin Lou, Ph.D. candidate  @ Cornell University, USA
  • Xixuan Feng, Ph.D. candidate @ University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

2008

  • Pengfei Qiu, Master candidate @ Univeristy of Science and Techology, China
  • Ye Yang, Master candidate @ Columbia University, USA
  • Lizhu Zhang, Master candidate @ Tsinghua University, China
  • Yukun Chen, Master candiate @ Tsinghua University, China
  • Xiao Zhang, Ph.D. candidate @ Penn State University, USA
  • Quannan Li, Ph.D. candidate @ University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), USA

2007

  • Like Liu, RSDE @ Microsoft Research Asia, China
  • Longhao Wang, Master Candidate @ University of California, Berkeley, USA

      

 

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