XIFENG YAN

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Professor
Venkatesh Narayanamurti Chair
Computer Science Department
University of California at Santa Barbara

Ph.D. (2006)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Curriculum Vitae [PDF] [Short Bio]

Affiliation: IEE, INARC, NS-CTA, and ICB

Computer Science Department
Rm 2017, Henley Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110

Direction
xyan [at) cs dot ucsb dot edu
Tel: (805) 893-3734
I am a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the co-inventor of Mica (and its studio PromptDialog), an agentic AI approach to conversational AI assistants.  The primary objective of my research is to explore foundation models in artificial intelligence, leveraging these models for knowledge discovery, and developing cross-disciplinary applications in areas like finance, healthcare, and science.  We have extensively innovated on graph mining, graph data management and pioneered transformer-based time series forecasting.

News (March 2025): Our agentic AI approach to conversational AI assistants, Mica (Multiple Intelligent Conversational Agents) is now live.  After years of exploring the ideal architecture for customer service bots, we finally arrived at a solution we are satisfied with. It is a kind of YAML version of OpenAI's Swarm.  Similar to SQL statements, it abstracts away implementation details, providing a succinct development experience, making systematic prompting engineering, testing and debugging possible in the future.  

News (Feb 2025): Our alumnus, Dr. Yu Su received 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship.

News (Aug 2024): PhD. student Zekun Li received JP Morgan PhD. Fellowship.

News (Sept 2023): Our GauchoChat team has won the overall first-place prize for the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5 (SGC5) . We found the weakness of the current large language models (LLMs) including ChatGPT and developed techniques, GauchoChat: Towards proactive, controllable, and personalized social conversation that turns a reactive LLM to a proactive one.

News (June 2023): Our GauchoAI team has won the second-place prize for the Alexa Simbot Challenge. Our approach is summarized in GauchoAI: A proactive modular embodied AI that collaborates with humans.
RESEARCH INTERESTS

Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing
RESEARCH PROJECTS  (publications) google scholar | dblp

  • Foundation Models (upcoming)
  • Artificial Intelligence for Finance and Science
  • Multimodal AI Assistants
  • Knowledge Grounded and Controllable Conversational AI (Amazon, PARC)
  • Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare (NSF)
  • Artificial Intelligence for Systems and IoTs
  • Motif Discovery in Massive Protein Sequences (10,000 times faster than MEME)
  • Knowledge Graph Query Processing and Benchmarking (NSF)
  • Graph Information System(NSF)
  • Network Science (ARL)
  • Collaborative Networks (NSF)
    • TEACHING

    		CS291A: Special Topics in Foundation Models (Spring, 2025)
    CS165A: Artificial Intelligence (Fall, 2024)
    CS165A: Artificial Intelligence (Spring, 2024)
    CS291K: Special Topics in Conversational AI (Winter, 2024)
    CS165B: Machine Learning (Spring, 2023)
    CS291A: Special Topics in Deep Learning (Winter, 2023)
    CS165A: Artificial Intelligence (Fall, 2022)
    Previous Courses
    STUDENTS
    Graduate Students:     Zekun Li, Ross Koval, Weizhi Wang, Sirui Zeng, Xuan Luo

    Alumni (PhD):  
    Alon Albalak (SynthLabs), 2024
    Hong Wang (Applied Scientist, Amazon AWS), 2023
    Shiyang Li (Research Scientist, Samsung Research), 2023
    Jing Qian (Research Scientist, Microsoft), 2022
    Zhiyu Chen (Assistant Professor, UT Dallas), 2022
    Xiaoyong Jin (Applied Scientist, Amazon AWS), 2022
    Hanwen Zha (Research Scientist, Facebook Research), 2021
    Wenhu Chen     (Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo), 2021
    Keqian Li     (Research Scientist, Yahoo Research), 2019
    Semih Yavuz (Research Scientist, Salesforce Research), 2019
    Izzeddin Gur     (Research Scientist, Google Research), 2019
    Bay-Yuan Hsu (Assistant Professor, National Tsinghua Univ.), 2019
     Yu Su (Assistant Professor, Ohio State Univ.), 2018
     Honglei Liu     (Research Scientist, Facebook), 2017
    Theodore Georgiou (Google), 2017
         Fangqiu Han (Snapchat), 2016
     Huan Sun (Associate Professor, Ohio State Univ.), 2015
    Bo Zong (NEC Labs America), 2015
     Yang Li (Google), 2015
     Shengqi Yang(Research Scientist, Facebook), 2015
     Arijit Khan     (ETH, now Associate Professor, Aalborg Univ., Denmark), 2013
         Nan Li (oDesk, Apple, now Facebook), 2013
    Gengxin Miao (Google), 2012

     Alumni (PostDoc):
    Shulong Tan     (Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab), 2015
    Yinghui Wu (Assistant Professor, Washington State Univ.), 2014
    Ying Tang (Associate Professor at Chengdu University of Technology), 2014
    Ziyu Guan (Professor, Northwest University, China), 2012

    Alumni (MS and Collaborators): Marina Zhukova (Linguistics, SocialBot), Rajan Saini (Google, 2023), Aaron Jimenez (Yardi Systems, 2023), Reeva Mishra (Microsoft, 2023,  reevamishra.com), Apoorva Jakalannanavar Halappa Manjula (Roku, 2022), Krishna Gudipati (TruckX, 2021), Benu Changmai (Amazon, 2021), Xiyou Zhou (OctoML, 2020), Yuxiao Zhang (2020), Hongmin Wang(Microsoft, 2020), Mu Xu (Facebook, 2019), Dong-Anh Nguyen (Google, 2017), Tianyu Wu (Google, 2016), Anastasiya Lazareva (Element Analytics, 2016), Alex Morales (UIUC, 2014), Nadav Caspi (Microsoft, 2014), Chen Liu (Oracle, 2013), Matt Weiden (HRL, 2012), Lei Zhao (LinkedIn, 2011), Russell McLoughlin (LLNL, 2010)
    Alumni (Undergraduate):     Xiyue Wang (Columbia, 2023), Xuan Luo (UCSB, 2022), Ari Polakof (Appfolio, GaTech 2022), Nuan Wen (USC, 2019), Yunkai Zhang (UC Berkeley, 2018), Alexander Wood (UCLA, 2014), Lijia Hong (CMU, 2012)
    Alumni (Highschool): Andy Jin (Stanford, 2018)

    HONORS and AWARDS

    1. The 1st place prize for the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5 (SGC5),
      The 2nd place prize for the Alexa Simbot Challenge, 2023
    2. Program Co-chair: 2023 ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD'23) Research Track Program Chair Report Slides.
    3. Test of Time Award at VLDB 2022
    4. Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2022
    5. Best of ICDM 2019 Selection
    6. Program Co-chair: 2019 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'19)
    7. ICDE 2013 Best Poster Award
    8. SIGKDD Best Student Paper Award, 2012
    9. IEEE ICDM 10-year Highest Impact Paper Award, 2011
    10. NSF Career Award, 2010
    11. The Venkatesh Narayanamurti Chair, Univ. of California at Santa Barbara, 2008-present
    12. ACM-SIGMOD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, 2007
    13. Best Student Paper, Proc. of 2007 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), 2007 
    14. Best Student Paper, Proc. of 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2007
    15. Excellent Teaching Assistant Award, CS Dept., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003, 2004
    16. Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, CS Dept., SUNY at Stony Brook, 2001
      17.

    Last Modified: July 10, 2022