Group Leader - Prof. Yong Yu
Prof. Yu got his master degree at the CS department of East China Normal University. He began to work in Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1986. Now he is a Ph.D. candidate tutor and the director of Apex Data & Knowledge Management Lab. His research interests include: web search, semantic search, data mining and machine learning. He has served as PC member of a dozen of related conferences (e.g. ISWC, WWW, SIGIR, RecSys, etc) in these field. As the principal investigator, he took charge of several NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China) and China National High Tech "863" Program projects. He has also established long-term collaborations with IBM China research lab, Microsoft research Asia, Google China and Intel China developing center to carry out several joint projects. As the head coach of SJTU ACM-ICPC team, he and his team have won the 2002, 2005 and 2010 ACM ICPC Championships.
Professor - Weinan Zhang
Weinan Zhang is now a professor (with tenure) at Department of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include reinforcement learning, agents, deep learning and data science with various real-world applications of robotics, LLM agents, recommender systems, game AI etc. He has published over 150 research papers on international conferences and journals and has been serving as an area chair at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, AAAI, IJCAI, SIGIR etc. and an associate editor TPAMI and FCS etc. He was granted as ACM Rising Star Award 2017 and Alibaba DAMO Young Scholar Award 2018. His research won the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at SIGIR 2017, the Best Paper Award at DLP-KDD Workshop 2019 and the Best System Paper Award at CoRL 2020. Weinan earned his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department of University College London in 2016 and B.E. from ACM Class of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011.
Associate Professor - Weiwen Liu
Weiwen Liu is currently a tenure-track associate professor at John Hopcroft Center of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests span large language models and recommendation algorithms, specifically focusing on: (a) Designing AI agents with long-term memory, reflection capabilities, and tool intelligence; (b) Advancing next-generation recommendation models powered by LLMs, with a particular focus on developing autonomous personalized agents for real-world applications. From September 2020 to April 2025, Weiwen worked at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab. Her research received the Best Paper Award at DLP-RecSys 2023. Prior to that, Weiwen received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020.
Assistant Professor - Jianghao Lin
Jianghao Lin is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Data and Business Intelligence at Antai College of Economics and Management (ACEM), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Concurrently, he serves as a co-supervisor at the APEX Data & Knowledge Management Lab in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests lie in the fields of generative foundation models and data science, with a particular focus on large language models, AI agents, and diffusion models. He is also dedicated to exploring their real-world applications in areas such as information retrieval, recommender systems, operations research, and intelligent business. His work has been recognized with Best Paper Awards at DLP-RecSys in 2023 and ReiK-KDD in 2024, respectively. Dr. Lin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2025 and his B.E. in Software Engineering, both from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, under the supervision of Prof. Weinan Zhang and Prof. Yong Yu.
Research Assistant Professor - Muning Wen
Muning is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Artificial Intelligence at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Concurrently, he serves as a co-supervisor at the APEX Data & Knowledge Management Lab in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests lie in the fields of reinforcement learning, LLM-based agents, and multi-agent system, with a particular focus on enhacing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Throughout his academic career, his primary goal has been to push the boundaries of sequential decision-making capabilities for autonomous agents by developing new RL/MARL algorithms. For now, he deeply interests in extending his research toward contnuous reinforcement learning. Dr. Wen received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2025 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, under the supervision of Prof. Weinan Zhang and Prof. Ying Wen.
