I passed my Ph.D. viva in May 2016 and joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University as an assistant professor in Aug. 2016..

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Previously I was a Ph.D. student supervised by Dr. Jun Wang and Prof. Stephen Robertson in Media Future Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL. My research interests include machine learning, big data mining and their applications in computational advertising and recommender systems. Particularly, I focus on the research of optimal DSP bidding strategies for RTB display advertising as my Ph.D. direction. I am also interested in deep learning models and have developed several domain-specified DNNs for predicting users' online commercial behaviour. More detailed research descriptions can be found here.

Before coming to UCL, I was a research student in APEX Data and Knowledge Management Lab and a member of ACM Class in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. In addition, I was an intern at MediaGamma, Microsoft Research, Google and DERI.

Tutorials

link	Learning, Prediction and Optimisation in RTB Display Advertising Weinan Zhang, Jian Xu CIKM, October 2016.

pdf	Real-Time Bidding based Display Advertising: Mechanisms and Algorithms Jun Wang, Shuai Yuan, Weinan Zhang ECIR, March 2016.

link	Paper Collection of Real-Time Bidding Weinan Zhang Github 2015.

pdf	Research Frontier of Real-Time Bidding based Display Advertising Weinan Zhang Beijing, August 2015.

Publications

pdf	User Response Learning for Directly Optimizing Campaign Performance in Display Advertising Kan Ren, Weinan Zhang, Yifei Rong, Haifeng Zhang, Yong Yu, Jun Wang CIKM 2016.   (Industry track accept rate: 19.8%)

pdf	LambdaFM: Learning Optimal Ranking with Factorization Machines Using Lambda Surrogates Fajie Yuan, Guibin Guo, Joemon Jose, Long Chen, Haitao Yu, Weinan Zhang CIKM 2016.   (Research track accept rate: 17.6%)

pdf	Functional Bid Landscape Forecasting for Display Advertising Yuchen Wang, Kan Ren, Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang, Yong Yu ECML/PKDD 2016.

pdf	Bid-aware Gradient Descent for Unbiased Learning with Censored Data in Display Advertising Weinan Zhang, Tianxiong Zhou, Jun Wang, Jian Xu KDD 2016.   (Accept rate: 16.8%)

pdf	Deep Learning over Multi-Field Categorical Data: A Case Study on User Response Prediction Weinan Zhang, Tianming Du, Jun Wang ECIR 2016.   (Accept rate: 21%)

pdf	Implicit Look-alike Modelling in Display Ads: Transfer Collaborative Filtering to CTR Estimation Weinan Zhang, Lingxi Chen, Jun Wang, Thomas Furmston ECIR 2016.   (Accept rate: 21%)

pdf	Collective Noise Contrastive Estimation for Policy Transfer Learning Weinan Zhang, Ulrich Paquet, Katja Hofmann AAAI 2016.   (Accept rate: 25.8%)

pdf	Feedback Control of Real-Time Display Advertising Weinan Zhang, Yifei Rong, Jun Wang, Tianchi Zhu, Xiaofan Wang WSDM 2016.   (Accept rate: 18.2%)

pdf	Risk-Hedged Venture Capital Investment Recommendation Xiaoxue Zhao*, Weinan Zhang*, Jun Wang RecSys 2015.   (Accept rate: 21.4%)

pdf	Statistical Arbitrage Mining for Display Advertising Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang KDD 2015.   (Accept rate: 19.4%)

pdf	Annotating Needles in the Haystack without Looking: Product Information Extraction from Emails Weinan Zhang, Amr Ahmed, Jie Yang, Vanja Josifovski, Alex J. Smola KDD 2015.   (I&G track; accept rate: 34.2%)

pdf	Optimal Real-Time Bidding for Display Advertising Weinan Zhang, Shuai Yuan, Jun Wang KDD 2014.   (Accept rate: 14.6%)

link	Real-Time Bidding Benchmarking with iPinYou Dataset Weinan Zhang, Shuai Yuan, Jun Wang, Xuehua Shen CoRR 2014.    abs/1407.7073

pdf	Bid Keyword Suggestion in Sponsored Search based on Competitiveness and Relevance Ying Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Bin Gao, Xiaojie Yuan, Tie-Yan Liu IPM.   2014 Vol. 50, No. 4. DOI=10.1016/j.ipm.2014.02.004

pdf	To Personalize or Not: A Risk Management Perspective Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang, Bowei Chen, Xiaoxue Zhao RecSys 2013.   (Accept rate: 23.8%)

pdf	An Empirical Study of Top-N Recommendation for Venture Finance Thomas Stone, Weinan Zhang, Xiaoxue Zhao CIKM 2013. (poster)

pdf	Interactive Collaborative Filtering Xiaoxue Zhao*, Weinan Zhang*, Jun Wang CIKM 2013.   (Accept rate: 16.9%)

pdf	Optimizing Top-N Collaborative Filtering via Dynamic Negative Item Sampling Weinan Zhang, Tianqi Chen, Jun Wang, Yong Yu SIGIR 2013. (short paper)

pdf	MeDetect: A LOD-Based System for Collective Entity Annotation in Biomedicine Li Tian, Weinan Zhang, Antonis Bikakis, Haofen Wang, Yong Yu, Yuan Ni, Feng Cao WI 2013.

pdf	SVDFeature: A Toolkit for Feature-based Collaborative Filtering Tianqi Chen, Weinan Zhang, Qiuxia Lu, Kailong Chen, Zhao Zheng, Yong Yu JMLR.    13 (2012) 3619-3622

pdf	A Semantic Approach to Recommending Text Advertisements for Images Weinan Zhang, Li Tian, Xinruo Sun, Haofen Wang, Yong Yu RecSys 2012.   (Accept rate: 20.2%)

pdf	Joint Optimization of Bid and Budget Allocation in Sponsored Search Weinan Zhang, Ying Zhang, Bin Gao, Yong Yu, Xiaojie Yuan and Tie-Yan Liu KDD 2012.  (Accept rate: 17.6%)

pdf	Serendipitous Personalized Ranking for Top-N Recommendation Qiuxia Lu, Tianqi Chen, Weinan Zhang, Diyi Yang, Yong Yu WI 2012.    Best paper nominee

pdf	MeDetect: Domain Entity Annotation in Biomedical References Using Linked Open Data Li Tian, Weinan Zhang, Haofen Wang, Chenyang Wu, Yuan Ni, Feng Cao, Yong Yu ISWC 2012. (poster)

pdf	Local Implicit Feedback Mining for Music Recommendation Diyi Yang, Tianqi Chen, Weinan Zhang, Qiuxia Lu, Yong Yu RecSys 2012.   (Accept rate: 20.2%)

pdf	Collaborative filtering with short term preferences mining Diyi Yang, Tianqi Chen, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu SIGIR 2012. (poster)

pdf	Advertising Keywords Recommendation for Short-text Web Pages using Wikipedia Weinan Zhang, Dingquan Wang, Gui-Rong Xue, and Hongyuan Zha ACM TIST.    Vol. 3, No. 2. DOI=10.1145/2089094.2089112

pdf	Feature Based Informative Model for Discriminating Favorite Items from Unrated Ones Bing Cheng, Tianqi Chen, Diyi Yang, Weinan Zhang, Yongqiang Wang, Yong Yu APWeb 2012.

pdf	TuneSensor: A Semantic-Driven Music Recommendation Service For Digital Photo Albums Jiansong Chao, Haofen Wang, Wenlei Zhou, Weinan Zhang and Yong Yu ISWC 2011. (poster)

pdf	Informative Household Recommendation with Feature-based Matrix Factorization Qiuxia Lu, Diyi Yang, Tianqi Chen, Weinan Zhang and Yong Yu RecSys 2011.    CAMRa Workshop

pdf	Informative Ensemble of Multi-Resolution Dynamic Factorization Models Tianqi Chen, Zhao Zheng, Qiuxia Lu, Xiao Jiang, Yuqiang Chen, Weinan Zhang, Kailong Chen, Yong Yu, Nathan N. Liu, Bin Cao, Luheng He and Qiang Yang KDD 2011.    KDD-CUP' 11 Workshop

pdf	Feature-Based Matrix Factorization Tianqi Chen, Zhao Zheng, Qiuxia Lu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu CoRR 2011.    abs/1109.2271

pdf	LODDO: Using Linked Open Data Description Overlap to Measure Semantic Relatedness Between Named Entities Wenlei Zhou, Haofen Wang, Jiansong Chao, Weinan Zhang and Yong Yu JIST 2011.

pdf	Deep Classifier for Large Scale Hierarchical Text Classification Dingquan Wang,Weinan Zhang, Gui-Rong Xue, and Yong Yu LSHTC 2009. (short paper)

Internships

MediaGamma Limited Research Intern, Data Science Group, supervised by Jun Wang and Rael Cline. London, United Kingdom    Jun. 2015 - Aug. 2015

Microsoft Research Cambridge Research Consultant, Machine Learning and Perception Group, supervised by Ulrich Paquet and Katja Hofmann. Cambridge, United Kingdom    Feb. 2015 - Jun. 2015

Microsoft Research Cambridge Research Intern, Machine Learning and Perception Group, supervised by Ulrich Paquet and Thore Graepel. Cambridge, United Kingdom    Sep. 2014 - Nov. 2014

Google Inc. Software Engineering Intern, Strategic Technology Group, supervised by Jie Yang and Vanja Josifovski. Mountain View, United States    Sep. 2013 - Dec. 2013

Digital Enterprise Research Institute Research Intern, Social Software Unit, supervised by Alexandre Passant. Galway, Ireland    Jul. 2011 - Sep. 2011

Microsoft Research Asia Research Intern, Internet Economics & Computational Ads Group, supervised by Bin Gao and Tie-Yan Liu. Beijing, China    Jul. 2010 - Jan. 2011

Open Source Projects

OpenBidder An online demand-side platform for benchmarking various RTB algorithms using standard evaluation protocol and real-world ad inventory. Report published in ArXiv.

SVDFeature An abstract framework to build new matrix factorization variants simply by defining features. Paper published in JMLR-MLOSS.

Datasets

iPinYou RTB Ad Logs The first public large-scale Real-time bidding advertising log dataset, it is released after iPinYou 2013 RTB competition. We help publish the dataset on the UCL server. Data analysis and benchmarking paper.

CrunchBase Venture Capital Investments This dataset is collected in May 2014 based on the CrunchBase offical data API. It contains the investment records of VC firms and individual partners. RecSys 2015 paper.

Competitions

iPinyou DSP 2013 Real-time bidding strategy optimization for demand side platforms.

CAMERa 2011 Context-aware movie recomendation challenge.

KDD Cup 2011 Yahoo! music recommendation challenge.

Yahoo! Learning to Rank Challenge 2010 Ranking top retrieved Web pages from Yahoo! search engine.

LSHTC 2009 Large-scale deep hierarchy text classification challenge.