Biographical Sketch

Jun Wang is Chair Professor, Computer Science, University College London, and Founding Director of MSc Web Science and Big Data Analytics. He is also Co-founder and Chief Scientist in MediaGamma Ltd, a UCL start-up company focusing on AI for intelligent audience decision making.

Prof. Jun Wang’s main research interests are in the areas of AI and intelligent systems, including (multiagent) reinforcement learning, deep generative models, and their diverse applications on information retrieval, recommender systems and personalization, data mining, smart cities, bot planning, computational advertising etc. His team won the first global real-time bidding algorithm contest with 80+ participants worldwide. Jun has published over 100 research papers and is a winner of multiple “Best Paper” awards. He was a recipient of the Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics award by Microsoft Research and also received Yahoo! FREP Faculty award. He has served as an Area Chair in ACM CIKM and ACM SIGIR. His recent service includes co-chair of Artificial Intelligence, Semantics, and Dialog in ACM SIGIR 2018. MediaGamma has received the UCLB One-to-Watch award 2016.

He has more than 15 years track records of advising the industry and knowledge transfer. He was a technical advisor for startups such as Last.Fm, Passiv Systems, Massive Analytic, Context Scout, and Polecat, and had various projects with BT, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Alibaba, Didi etc.

Prof. Wang obtained his PhD degree in Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; MSc degree in National University of Singapore, Singapore; and Bachelor degree in Southeast University, Nanjing, China.

Selected Awards

  • Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, ACM SIGIR 2017

  • UCLB One-to-Watch award 2016

  • Yahoo! FREP Faculty award, 2014

  • Best Paper Prize, AdKDD 2014

  • Best Paper Prize, ECIR2012

  • Best Paper Prize, ECIR2009

  • “Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics”, Microsoft 2007

  • Best Doctoral Consortium award, ACM SIGIR06