Jiawei Han, Michael Aiken Chair Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois Shares His Priorities and Targets in 2022

Jiawei Han, Michael Aiken Chair Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois

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Our Leading Data Academic Leaders List 2022 honors these great academic leaders, introducing them on a global platform where they share their insights and work, highlighting their significant successes in the previous year, the challenges they faced, and their aspirations and goals for 2022.

Introducing: Jiawei Han, Michael Aiken Chair Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois USA)

1. What were your most significant achievements in 2021, specifically in the last two years, and why? 

We have made good progress on new methods for transforming unstructured text into structures to facilitate knowledge mining.

2. What challenges are you facing in the academic data field? 

Since over 80% of real-world data is in the form of unstructured natural language text data, mining text data for structured knowledge is an important research frontier.

3. What traits and qualities are required to be a successful academic data leader? 

Focusing on important research directions, working on real-world problems, and building a strong, dedicated team to work out effective solutions on challenging problems.

4. Tell us about your priorities in 2022. What are your key targets? 

Continue to work on text mining by exploring powerful self-supervised or weekly supervised approaches.

5. What advice would you offer aspiring academic leaders to help them prepare for the role? 

Be sharp, find interesting directions, and dare to challenge the state-of-the-art.

Jiawei Han is the Abel Bliss Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches advanced data mining. Prof. Han is also the Director of Information Network Academic Research Center (INARC), supported by Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NSCTA) program of U.S. Army Research Lab (ARL). Han has chaired or served on over 100 program committees of international conferences and workshops, including PC co-chair of 2005 (IEEE), International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), and Americas Coordinator of 2006 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB). He also served as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. He is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. Han received his BS from University of Science and Technology of China in 1979 and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Computer Science in 1985.

Jiawei Han is one of our Leading Academic Data Leaders in 2022. To discover the full list, click here now