Before that, he was a research staff member and research manager at IBM Research - China. He holds B.S. (2003), M.S. (2006) and Ph.D. (2008) degrees from Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His current research interests are visual analytics and data mining, with more than 60 papers published in top-tier venues, such as IEEE TVCG, TKDE, TC, VIS, ICDE, ICDM, Infocom, ACM Sigcomm and CSCW. He is the recipient of IBM Research Division Award on "Visual Analytics" and the IEEE VAST Challenge Award twice in 2010 and 2012. He has organized several workshops and journal special issues in combining visual analytics and data mining, in ICDM, CIKM, ACM BCB, BMC bioinformatics and CJE. He served PC members and reviewers for most top-tier visualization and data mining confs/journals. He is an IEEE senior member.