He received his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from University of Sydney and NICTA in 2008, and then conducted his post-doctoral research in the Department of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University, between 2008 and 2011. Before he joined Georgia Institute of Technology, he was a research scientist at Google. His principal research direction is machine learning, especially nonlinear methods and probabilistic graphical models for large scale and complex problems, arising from artificial intelligence, social network analysis, healthcare analytics, and other interdisciplinary domains. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award’14, AISTATS’16 Best Student Paper Award, IPDPS’15 Best Paper Award, NIPS’13 Outstanding Paper Award, and ICML’10 Best Paper Award. He has also served as the area chair for leading machine learning conferences such as ICML, NIPS and AISTATS, and action editor for JMLR.