Core innovation team

Yong Liu

 / Head of Data Science

 

Yong Liu has over 20 years of professional experiences in data science and machine learning, in both academia and industry. He joined Plunk’s team in Sept 2022 and leads the full life cycle machine learning engineering and data science research and development work.

Prior to joining Plunk, Yong has worked in both startups (Outreach Corp and Maana Inc.) and a major technology company (Microsoft). Yong has been working on "Big Data," "Big Compute," and "Big Learning" since his doctoral student years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent industry experience includes shipping high performance transfer learning NLP models, building predictive maintenance solution (Industrial Internet of Things) for industrial digitalization revolution for Fortune 500 companies, delivering language modeling in the Xbox production system, and doing big data analytics using Bing search stacks. 

Yong has been a frequent speaker at Spark+AI /Data+AI Summit, NLP summit,  ACM/IEEE High Performance Machine Learning workshop, IEEE eScience conferences, ACM GIS conferences, Supercomputing Conferences and many other computing, data and ML/NLP workshops at national and international levels. Prior to his industry experience, Yong was Principal Investigator at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) leading projects funded by National Science Foundation and Microsoft Research. He has recently published peer-reviewed papers on deep learning, linked data, and knowledge-infused learning at various ACM/IEEE conferences and journals. In July 2022, he published a technical book entitled Practical Deep Learning at Scale with MLflow which summarizes his production deep learning expertise. Yong holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.