Hongyang Ryan Zhang
Hongyang Zhang photo 

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Northeastern University, Boston

Email: ho.zhang@northeastern.edu
Address: 177 Huntington Ave, Room 2211 (note)

Hi! I am an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University, Boston. I work on machine learning theory and methods, with a particular emphasis on the design and analysis of algorithms with better generalization, across heterogeneous tasks and diverse environments. I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford. While studying at Stanford, I had the great fortune of working with members of the theoretical computer science group and the machine learning groups. Before moving to Boston, I was a postdoc at UPenn's statistics department for ten months. I received my B.Eng. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. You can find complete information about me in my resume.

In my ongoing projects, my students and I have been developing algorithms with better generalization for modern machine learning. We are actively developing the principles and the empirical frameworks for multitask learning. This requires better modeling of task relationships and reconciling heterogeneous subpopulations. While we are driven by the technical questions, we are also striving for impact in social contexts; For instance, recently we've been looking to understand accidents on the road based on traffic network data.

Publications

Recent, Selected Papers

You can also see a more complete list of my publications, either chronologically, or categorized. Here is my Google Scholar and DBLP profiles. Here contains open-sourced experiment codes for the above projects on GitHub

Recent Activities

Research Lab/Teaching

Currently, I work with and advise the following list of students: Dongyue (Oliver) Li (Ph.D., starting 2021), Haotian Ju (MS in Data Analytics Engineering, 2022; Ph.D., starting 2023), Abhinav Nippani (MS in CS, since 2023), and Allen Ye (Undergraduate in CS, since 2023).

Here are the students whom have worked with me and whom have graduated from Northeastern, including their first employment: Virender Singh (MS in CS, 2021; First employment: Data Scientist at Salesforce), Minghao Liu (MS in CS, 2022; First employment, SDE at Palantir), and Shreya Singh (MS in CS, 2022).

Prospective students: We are always looking for students to join us. If you have ideas, I'd love to chat! You can take a look at my recent papers and recent projects at GitHub. We have a StatsML lab page if you are interested in learning more information. Undergraduate students interested in pursuing research are also encouraged to contact me. Students from underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to apply to our CS Ph.D. program and will be eligible for one year of fellowship. The ideal student needs to be self-motivated, and have a strong background in programming. If you are interested in working with my students and me as an RA, you can fill out this form, so that we are aware of your interest. We'll be in touch via email if we see a fit with our projects.

Here are the classes that I have been teaching at Northeastern:

Education/Experience