People

Dr. Yu Yang is an Assistant Professor with the Centre for Learning, Teaching, and Technology (LTTC) and the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology (MIT) at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). He received his PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyU) in 2021 and then became a Research Assistant Professor with the Department of Computing at HKPolyU. Dr. Yang’s research interests lie in AI for education, Agentic AI, LLM-based Role-playing, Graph Representation Learning, Spatiotemporal Data Analysis, and Urban Computing. In addition to publishing high-quality research papers in top journals and conferences, his research output has been applied to multiple industries. Dr. Yang served as a reviewer and program committee member for many international journals and conferences like IEEE TKDE, ACM TOIS, SIGKDD, TheWebConf, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, etc.

• AI for Education
• Agentic AI
• LLM-based Role-playing
• Graph Representation Learning
• Spatiotemporal Data Analysis
• Urban Computing

• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Science
• Database System

Journal Publications

• Hanchen Yang, Yuwei Chen, Jiannong Cao, Wengen Li, Yu Yang, Shuyu Wang, Jihong Guan, Rufu Qin, Shuigeng Zhou (2024). UniOcean: A Unified Framework for Predicting Multiple Ocean Factors of Varying Temporal Scales. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2024.3506058 SDGs infomation: 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation, 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities, 13 - Climate Action

• Qianyi Chen, Jiannong Cao, Yu Yang, Wanyu Lin, Sumei Wang, Youwu Wang (2024). Multistage graph convolutional network with spatial attention for multivariate time series imputation. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2024.3486349 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Shutong Xie, Zongbao He, Yee Man Loh, Yu Yang, Kunhong Liu, Chao Liu, Chi Fai Cheung, Nan Yu, Chunjin Wang (2024). A novel interpretable predictive model based on ensemble learning and differential evolution algorithm for surface roughness prediction in abrasive water jet polishing. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 35, 2787-2810. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-023-02175-4 SDGs infomation: 9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

• Yu Yang, Jiangnan Xia, Senzhang Wang, Hongzhi Yin, Jiannong Cao, Philip S Yu (2024). Bayes-enhanced multi-view attention networks for robust POI recommendation. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 36(7), 2895-2909. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3329673 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Yicong Li, Xiangguo Sun, Hongxu Chen, Sixiao Zhang, Yu Yang, Guandong Xu (2024). Attention is not the only choice: Counterfactual reasoning for path-based explainable recommendation. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 36(9), 4458-4471. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2024.3373608

• Yu Yang, Hongzhi Yin, Jiannong Cao, Tong Chen, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Xiaofang Zhou, Lei Chen (2023). Time-aware dynamic graph embedding for asynchronous structural evolution. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 35(9), 9656-9670. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3246059 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Zhiyuan Wen, Jiannong Cao, Yu Yang, Haoli Wang, Ruosong Yang, Shuaiqi Liu (2023). DesPrompt: Personality-descriptive prompt tuning for few-shot personality recognition. Information Processing and Management, 60(5), Article 103422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103422 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being

• Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Milos Stojmenovic, Senzhang Wang, Yiran Cheng, Chun Lum, Zhetao Li (2023). Time-capturing dynamic graph embedding for temporal linkage evolution. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 35(1), 958-971. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2021.3085758 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being, 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Si Fan, Lihua Chen, Manoj Nair, Saurabh Garg, Soonja Yeom, Gerry Kregor, Yu Yang, Yanjun Wang (2021). Revealing impact factors on student engagement: Learning analytics adoption in online and blended courses in higher education. Education Sciences, 11(10), Article 608. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11100608 SDGs infomation: 4 - Quality Education

Conference Papers

• Qihao Yang, Yu Yang, Sixu An, Tianyong Hao, Guandong Xu (2025). Llm-Based Collaborative Agents With Pedagogy-Guided Interaction Modeling for Timely Instructive Feedback Generation In Task-Oriented Group Discussions. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-25), pp. 9972-9980, August 16 – August 22, 2025, Montreal, Canada. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1108

• Jiangnan Xia, Yu Yang, Jiaxing Shen, Senzhang Wang, Jiannong Cao (2025). FairTP: A Prolonged Fairness Framework for Traffic Prediction. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(25), pp. 26391-26399. February 25 – March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i25.34838 SDGs infomation: 10 - Reduced Inequality, 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Zhi Zhang, Yan Liu, Sheng-hua Zhong, Gong Chen, Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao (2025). Mixture of Knowledge Minigraph Agents for Literature Review Generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(24), pp. 26012-26020. February 25 – March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i25.34838 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being, 4 - Quality Education

• Hao Chen, Yu Yang, Yuanchen Bei, Zefan Wang, Yue Xu, Feiran Huang (2025, February). Graph Neural Patching for Cold-Start Recommendations. Databases theory and applications: 35th Australasian Database Conference, ADC 2024, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia, and Tokyo, Japan, December 16–18, 2024, Proceedings, "Gold Coast", "Tokyo". https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-1242-0_25

• Shizhuo Deng, Qingyuan Yang, Zhibin Yang, Dongyue Chen, Yu Yang, Hao Wang (2025, February). Tri-modality collaborative learning for person re-identification. Databases theory and applications: 35th Australasian Database Conference, ADC 2024, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia, and Tokyo, Japan, December 16–18, 2024, Proceedings, "Gold Coast", "Tokyo". https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-1242-0_24 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being

• Shuyang Li, Yu Yang, Yichen Lv, Jiangnan Xia, Xin Wang (2025, February). ResGAT: Embedding adjacent connectivity of brain regions from fMRI for accurate Parkinson’s Disease recognition. Advanced data mining and applications: 20th International Conference, ADMA 2024, Sydney, NSW, Australia, December 3–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part IV, "Gold Coast", "Tokyo". https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0840-9_7 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being

• Ying Zhao, Songxu Xu, Jiajia Li, Yu Yang, Jing Zhang, Chengcheng Chen (2024, December). Efficient shortest time query in public transportation networks. Advanced data mining and applications: 20th International Conference, ADMA 2024, Sydney, NSW, Australia, December 3–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part III https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0821-8_23 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Longfei Gao, Ying Zhao, Jiajia Li, Jing Zhang, Yu Yang, Na Guo (2024). Jointly Trajectory Representation Learning on Road Network and Semantics using On-road IoT Data. In 2024 IEEE 30th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), Oct. 10 to 14, 2024, Belgrade, Serbia. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPADS63350.2024.00037 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Li, Y., Yang, Y., Cao, J., Liu, S., Tang, H., & Xu, G. (2024, August). Toward Structure Fairness in Dynamic Graph Embedding: A Trend-aware Dual Debiasing Approach. [Paper presentation]. The 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2024, Barcelona, Spain. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671848

• Haoli Wang, Jiangnan Xia, Yu Yang, Senzhang Wang, Jiannong Cao (2024, July). STS2ANet: Spatio-temporal synchronized sliding attention network for accurate cross-day origin-destination prediction. Database systems for advanced applications: 29th International Conference, DASFAA 2024, Gifu, Japan, July 2–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part I, Gifu, Japan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5552-3_12 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Jiabei Cheng, Zhen-Qun Yang, Jiannong Cao, Yu Yang, Kai Cheung Franky Poon, Daniel Lai (2024, July). Modeling behavior change for multi-model at-risk students early prediction. Proceedings of 2024 International Symposium on Educational Technology, ISET 2024, Macao. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISET61814.2024.00020 SDGs infomation: 4 - Quality Education

• Xiaoyin Li, Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Zhen-Qun Yang, Kaile Wang (2024, June). Investigating learning behaviors and intervention effectiveness of students with special educational needs. Blended learning. Intelligent computing in education: 17th International Conference on Blended Learning, ICBL 2024, Macao SAR, China, July 29 – August 1, 2024, Proceedings, Macao. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-4442-8_20 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being, 4 - Quality Education, 10 - Reduced Inequality

• Zhiyuan Wen, Jiannong Cao, Yu Yang, Ruosong Yang, Shuaiqi Liu (2024, March). Affective-NLI: Towards accurate and interpretable personality recognition in conversation. Proceedings of 2024 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PerCom 2024, Biarritz, France. https://doi.org/10.1109/PerCom59722.2024.10494487 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being, 10 - Reduced Inequality

• Chengyi Ju, Jiannong Cao, Yu Yang, Zhen-Qun Yang, Ho Man Lee (2023, December). Heterogeneity-aware cross-school electives recommendation: A hybrid federated approach. Proceedings of 23rd IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, ICDMW 2023, Shanghai. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW60847.2023.00191 SDGs infomation: 4 - Quality Education

• Jiaxing Shen, Yulin He, Yunfei Long, Jiaqi Wen, Yanwen Wang, Yu Yang (2023, December). Birds of a feather purchase together: Accurate social network inference using transaction data. Proceedings of 23rd IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, ICDMW 2023, Shanghai. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW60847.2023.00176

• Yuhao Zheng, Lian Zhong, Senzhang Wang, Yu Yang, Weixi Gu, Junbo Zhang, Jianxin Wang (2023, October). DiffUFlow: Robust fine-grained urban flow inference with denoising diffusion model. Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2023, Birmingham, UK. https://doi.org/10.1145/3583780.3614842 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Yifei Shen, Zhuo Li, Yu Yang, Jiaxing Shen (2023, August). Domain adaptive pre-trained model for mushroom image classification. Advanced data mining and applications: 19th International Conference, ADMA 2023, Shenyang, China, August 21–23, 2023, Proceedings, Part IV https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46674-8_20 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being

• Zhuo Li, Yifei Shen, Ruiqing Xu, Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Linchun Wu, Qing Wu (2023, April). Weakly-supervised multi-action offline reinforcement learning for intelligent dosing of epilepsy in children. Database systems for advanced applications: 28th International Conference, DASFAA 2023, Tianjin, China, April 17–20, 2023, Proceedings, Part IV, Tianjing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30678-5_16 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being

• Ka Ho Wong, Jiannong Cao, Yu Yang, Wengen Li, Jia Wang, Zhongyu Yao, Suyan Xu, Esther Ahn Chian Ku, Chun On Wong, David Leung (2020). BigARM: A big-data-driven airport resource management engine and application tools. Database systems for advanced applications: 25th International Conference, DASFAA 2020, Jeju, South Korea, September 24–27, 2020, Proceedings, Part III, Jeju, South Korea. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59419-0_48 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Jiaxing Shen, Ruosong Yang, Zhiyuan Wen (2020). Learning analytics based on multilayer behavior fusion. Blended learning. Education in a smart learning environment: 13th International Conference, ICBL 2020, Bangkok, Thailand, August 24–27, 2020, Proceedings, Bangkok, Thailand. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51968-1_2 SDGs infomation: 4 - Quality Education

• Yu Yang, Zhiyuan Wen, Jiannong Cao, Jiaxing Shen, Hongzhi Yin, Xiaofang Zhou (2020). EPARS: Early prediction of at-risk students with online and offline learning behaviors. Database systems for advanced applications: 25th International Conference, DASFAA 2020, Jeju, South Korea, September 24–27, 2020, Proceedings, Part II, Jeju, South Korea. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59416-9_1 SDGs infomation: 3 - Good Health and Well-Being, 4 - Quality Education

• Zhuo Li, Jiannong Cao, Zhongyu Yao, Wengen Li, Yu Yang, Jia Wang (2020). Recursive balanced k-subset sum partition for rule-constrained resource allocation. Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2020, Virtual Event Ireland. https://doi.org/10.1145/3340531.3412076 SDGs infomation: 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Jiating Zhu, Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Esther Chak Fung Mei (2019). New product design with popular fashion style discovery using machine learning. Artificial intelligence on fashion and textiles: Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence on Fashion and Textiles (AIFT) Conference 2018, Hong Kong, July 3–6, 2018, Hong Kong. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99695-0_15

• Yu Yang, Hanqing Wu, Jiannong Cao (2016). Smartlearn: Predicting learning performance and discovering smart learning strategies in flipped classroom. Proceedings of 2016 International Conference on Orange Technologies, ICOT 2016, Australia. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOT.2016.8278987 SDGs infomation: 4 - Quality Education