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Home > People > Yu Zheng
Yu Zheng

 

 

Yu Zheng (郑宇)   Ph. D.

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

Web Search & Mining Group (WSM)   

Ubiquitous Computing Group (Ubicomp)

 

Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)  [My Curriculum Vitae]  [My Google Scholar Page]
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 researcher from Microsoft Research Asia. He is an IEEE senior member and ACM senior member. His research interests include location-based services, spatio-temporal data mining, ubiquitous computing, and mobile social applications. Specifically, he is lauded for his research into trajectory data mining, location-based social networks, and urban computing. He has published over 50 referred papers at 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 3 best paper awards from UIC’10, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS’11, and ADMA'11 as well as 1 best paper nominee from Ubicomp’11. Meanwhile, he has a number of most cited papers in a few conferences and journals, such as MDM (2009), ACM GIS (2008 and 2010), and IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (2010). He has published two book chapters and edited one book as an editor-in-chief. He has been invited to over 30 prestigious international conferences as a chair or program committee member, including KDD, Ubicomp, IJCAI, ACM SIGSIAPTAL, ACM MM, PAKDD, and SSTD, etc. He is also an editorial board of 4 international journals and a frequent invited speaker in  confeferences, workshops, and forums, as well as leading organizations and univeristies like MIT and UIUC. He has significant collaboration with professors and professionals around the world in co-authoring papers, co-organizing conferences, co-editing books, and co-supervising students. So far, he has supervised over 30 visiting Ph.D. students from around the world. 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 (in China).

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 (Microsoft) and Xiaofang Zhou will be published by Springer in this November. Now, 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

  • 2012.5.10: We have two papers accepted by KDD 2012. New!
  • 2012.4.17: I will give a tutorial on location-based social networks at WWW 2012 conference (Slides). New!
  • 2012.4.10: I gave an invited talk about Urban Computing in MIT Media Lab. (see more) New!
  • 2012.3.31: I am organizing the 4th International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN 2012). New!
  • 2012.3.14: I am organizing the special issue on Urban Computing at ACM TIST as a guest editor (CFP). New!
  • 2012.3.11: I am organizing the International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp 2012) as a program chair. New!

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. Microsoft Golden Star, 2008
  4. Best paper award at International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2011)
  5. Best paper award nominee in UbiComp 2011
  6. Best paper runner up award in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010
  7. Best paper award in International conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2010)
  8. The most cited paper in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010
  9. The most cited paper in IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 2010
  10. The most cited paper in MDM 2009
  11. The most cited paper in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008
  12. The second most cited paper in WWW 2009
  13. The second most cited author in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS from 2008 to 2010
  14. Outstanding Ph.D. thesis award from Southwest Jiaotong University 2007

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

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

Books and Book Chapters

  • Yu Zheng (Editor-in-Chief) and Xiaofang Zhou, Computing with Spatial Trajectories. Springer 2011. ISBN:978-1-4614-1628-9
  • Yu Zheng, Location-Based Social Networks: Users. Springer press, 2011. (a book chapter). ISBN: 978-1-4614-1628-9
  • Yu Zheng and Xing Xie, Location-Based Social Networks: Locations. Springer press, 2011. (a book chapter) 

Selected  Papers

2012

2011

 2010

 2009

 2008

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Selected Professional Activities (Complete List)

Chairs

  • 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)
  • PC of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2011)
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011)
  • Senior PC of Asia-Pacific Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2012)
  • ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Geographic Information Systems (GIS 2011) (GIS 2010)
  • International Conference on Database Systems For Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2011)
  • International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2012) (DEXA 2011) (DEXA 2010) (DEXA 2009)
  • International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2010)(MDM 2012) 
  • International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Database (SSTD 2011)
  • Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2012) (ADC 2011) (ADC 2010)
  • 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)

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 and 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 award at International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2011)
  • Best paper award nominee at UbiComp 2011
  • Best paper runner up award at ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010
  • Best paper award at 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 167 users in a period of over two years (from April 2007 to Dec. 2010). 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

2012

  • 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
  • Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Ph.D. candidate  @ Hongkong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
  • Jing Yuan, Ph.D. candidate @ Univeristy of Science and Techology, China
  • 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