Prior to joining SMU, he was a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineering of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He received his Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, and his Master and Ph.D degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include large-scale machine learning with application to tackling big data analytics challenges across a wide range of real-world applications, including multimedia retrieval, social media, web search and information retrieval, computer vision and pattern recognition, computational finance, cyber security, mobile and software data mining, etc. He has published over 100 papers in premier conferences and journals, and served as an organizer, area chair, senior PC, TPC member, editors, and referee for many top conferences and premier journals.