Date: Friday, May 12, 2017

Time: 2-3pm

Location: 4405 Siebel Center

Speaker: Dr. Chao Liu, CEO of TianYanCha Inc

Title: TianYanCha: The Heterogeneous Information Network of Chinese Enterprises

Abstract: TianYanCha Inc. (www.tianyancha.com) is the No. 1 Business Investigation Platform in China, supported by the State’s venture capital. It accumulates all the public information about 120 million Chinese enterprises from the Web, and organizes them as a dynamically evolving information network. By checking various aspects of a particular enterprise and its connections to other ones, the investigator can usually locate suspicious points that may otherwise miss. For example, KPMG heavily use it in the i-section of everyday auditing work, to uncover related parties and transactions in between. In this talk, I will review the motivation and evolution of TianYanCha, and share with the audience some lessons learnt during the startup.

Bio：Dr. Chao Liu is the founder and CEO of TianYanCha Inc. (www.tianyancha.com), which is the No. 1 Business Investigation Platform in China. Before founding the company, Dr. Liu served as the Chief Scientist and director in Sogou and Tencent. Before going back to China, Dr. Liu was a researcher at Microsoft Research at Redmond, and led the Data Intelligence Group. His research has been focused on Web services (e.g., search and ads) and data mining, with about 40 conference/journal publications in renowned conferences (e.g., ICML, KDD, SIGIR, FSE, etc) and journals (e.g., IEEE-TSE, IEEE-Computer and ACM TKDD). In addition, many of his research results have been transferred to Microsoft Bing search engine. Chao has been on the program and organizing committees of many conferences, and actively campaigns for the mutualism between academia and industry. He served on the funding review committee for the United States National Science Foundation (US-NSF) for the data mining track in Washington DC, 2011. Chao earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in 2003.