He received a PhD degree (2014) from University of Illinois at Chicago in computer science. His research interests are in data mining and big data analysis, with emphasis on addressing the data variety issues in biomedical research and social computing. In 2009, he joined the Big Data and Social Computing Lab at University of Illinois, Chicago, where he has been working on mining graph data in the domains of neuroscience, biomedical informatics and social networks. Since then, he has published 30 papers in many top conferences and journals, including KDD, ICDM, SDM, WWW, WSDM, CIKM, TKDE. One of his papers on graph mining was selected as a best ICDM'10 paper for publication in KAIS Journal. He serves as the associated EIC of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. Host: Professor Lifeng Lai