Dr. Yanjun Qi

What's New

Year of News : [2024] [2023] [2021] [2020] [2019] [2018][2017][2016][2015] [2014] [2013] [Pre-2013]

2022-26

[2025]: DrQi continues her AWS Journey as Amazon Scholar in Agentic AI Org of AWS. She helped launch the Agent Policy Engine and AWS security agent product features.

[2024 winter]: DrQi's gave an Invited Keynote speech at the 2024 NeurIPS Workshop on Responsibly Building Next Generation of Multimodal Foundation Models. Talk Title: Improving toxicity guardrails’ adversarial robustness.

[2023-26] Dr. Qi have been awarded as a School of Engineering and Applied Science Copenhaver Faculty Fellow effective 23-26;
[2022-2024]: Dr. Qi joined Amazon Web Services as Principal Applied Scientists (also as Senior Science Manager). She helped Lauch >10 AWS Bedrock high-value generative AI product features, including model evaluation, model customization, model distillation, and LLM guardrails. In 2023, she also helped AWS win high-profile customer RFP awards and solved high-value business problems with production solutions for multiple large AWS enterprise customers.

2021

[ Sept. 2021]: UVAToday News Covered our research @ [NewsURL].

[Sept. 2021]: NIH Cancer Center Data News Covered our research on DeepChrome @ "Computer Savvy Scientist Blends Technology with Biology to Create Attention-Based Deep Learning Methods for Genomics Data"

[Sept. 2021]: UVA School of Engineering Data Discovery News Covered our research @ Artificial Intelligence Tools That Have the Power to Turn Biomedical Data into Better Medicine" introducing our deepChrome projects.

[2021]: DrQi joined as part of the NIH Data and Technology Advancement (DATA) National Service Scholar Program: Data Scientists Advancing Biomedical Research in National Institute of Health, NIA.

[2021 Aug]: DrQi gave a tutorial talk on DeepChrome and related (Slides) at NIH Data Science Showcase Seminar Serie.

[2021 summer]: DrQi gave a tutorial talk on TextAttack (Slides) at Science Academy Machine Learning Summer School and at UVA Human and Machine Intelligence Seminar Series.

[2021]: DrQi co-organize an ICLR 2021 workshop on robust and reliable ML. See (CFP).

2020

[2020 Spring]: DrQi is Sabbatical at UC Berkeley Statistics Department.

[2020/05/05]: Congratulations to my students, Jack Lanchantin and John Morris, who received 2019-2020 UVA CS Department Awards. See award details (Here). Jack Morris received Louis T. Rader Chairperson Award (for leadership in research ); Jack Lanchantin received Outstanding Service Award.

2019

[2019/06]: Dr. Qi is promoted to associate professor of computer science without term (tenured), effective August 2019.

[2019/05/01]: Congratulations to my Ph.D. students, Jack Lanchantin and Weilin Xu. Both were selected for the 2018-19 UVA CS Graduate Service Award.

[2019/04/15]: Big Congratulations to my third Ph.D. student, Weilin Xu, who successfully passed his dissertation defense today! Dissertation title: "Improving Robustness of Neural Networks using Domain Knowledge". (Weilin will be a Research Staff Member at Intel Research Lab from Summer 2019.

[2019/04/05]: Congratulations to my Computer Science PhD student, Jack Lanchantin, who has been awarded as the UVA Presidential Fellows Award in Data Science 2019-2020.

[2019/03/03]: My PhD student Jack gave the very first talk at UVA AIML-seminar today! Great job- [Jack Lanchantin, "Deep Learning for Genomics". He introduced two essential biologica processes related to the Genome and explain our work in using deep learning to predict and understand them. Seminar Announcement at https://uvaml.github.io/.

2018

[2018/07/20]: Big congratulations to my second Ph.D. student Beilun Wang! He has just passed his Ph.D. defense ! Dissertation: jointnets.org; Beilun, we are all very proud of you! (Beilun will be an Assistant Professor at School of Computer Science and Engineering of Southeast University in China from Fall 2018.

[2018/03/12]: Big congratulations to my first Ph.D. student Ritambhara Singh! She has just passed her Ph.D. defense this Monday! Title: Fast and Interpretable Classification of Sequential Data in Biology; Ritas, we're all very proud of you! (Rita will be an Assistant Professor at Computer Science Department of Brown University (deferred to 2019; 18-19 at U.Washington))).

[2018/03/12]: Congratulations to my Computer Science Ph.D. student, "Jack Lanchantin" who has just been awarded the UVA Store G Olsson Endowed Graduate Fellowship effective Fall 2018.

[2018/05/03]:Congratulations to my Computer Science PhD student, Beilun Wang, who won the Computer Science Graduate Research Award of 2017-2018.

[2018/05/03]:Congratulations to my Computer Science under-capstone students, Derrick Blakely and Eamon Collins. Eamon and Derrick won the Computer Science Undergraduate Research Award of 2017-2018.

[2018/05/03]:Congratulations to my under-capstone student Zachary Skemp, whose undergraduate thesis project was selected into the finalist of UVA SEAS Undergraduate Research and Design Symposium-Design track 2017-2018.

[2018/05/05]: Congratulations to my Computer Science PhD student, Arshdeep Sekhon, who has been awarded as the UVA Presidential Fellows Award in Data Science 2018-2019.

[2018/03/03]: Dr. Qi just contributed two talks at UCLA Computational Genomics Winter Institute and NCBI CBB seminar. Talk title: Making Deep Learning Understandable for Analyzing Sequential Data about Gene Regulation. Slide @ (Here) ; Video Recording @ (Youtube):

2017

[2017/03/30]: Dr. Qi won the "Advisor of the Year" award in the UVERS (University of Virginia Engineering Research Symposium)! The Advisor of the Year award was selected by the graduate students of UVA school of engineering.

[2017/12]: Congratulations to my PhD student, Jack Lanchantin. His DeepMotif paper has received the "best paper award" at NIPS2017 workshop for Transparent and interpretable Machine Learning in Safety Critical Environments. Code available at at (Here).

[2017/12]: Congratulations to my PhD student, "Jack Lanchantin" who has received the NIPS-2017 travel fellowship.

[2017/12]: Congratulations to my PhD student, "Ritambhara Singh" who has received the NIPS-2017 travel fellowship.

[2017/11/02]: My PhD student, Beilun Wang, delivered an exciting talk @ UVA Neuroscience Graduate Program Retreat 2017. Talk Title: A Constrained, Weighted-L1 Minimization Approach for Joint Discovery of Heterogeneous Neural Connectivity Graphs. Presentation slides available at (Here).

[2017/05/22]: In the past year, I’ve been so fortunate to work with Muthuraman Chidambaram, Chandan Singh and Andrew Norton. Yesterday they all obtained the Bachelor of Computer Science with the highest distinction! Muthu and Chandan also got their degrees in three years! Big congratulations!

[2017/05/10]: Congratulations to my PhD student, Ritambhara Singh, who has been awarded with a GHC Student Scholarship to attend the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2017 (#GHC17).

[2017/04/23]: Congratulations to my under-RA: Chandan Singh, His senior thesis "A novel Machine-Learning Algorithm for Uncovering Brain Connections Underlying Autism" was named as the winner of SEAS Undergraduate Research and Design Symposium-Design. He has also won the Computer Science Undergraduate Research Award of 2016-2017.

[2017/03/30]: Congratulations to my PhD student, Ritambhara Singh, who won first prize in the UVERS (University of Virginia Engineering Research Symposium) podium presentation competition. She has also won the Computer Science Graduate Research Award of 2016-2017.

2016

[2016/09/16]: Dr. Qi, gave an invited talk @ UVA DSI (Datapalooza Event). Talk Title: "Machine Learning for Big Data in Biomedicine". (Slide)

[2016/09/01]: Dr. Qi, Prof. Evans and Prof. Weimer an NSF grant, "TWC: Small: Automatic Techniques for Evaluating and Hardening Machine Learning Classifiers in the Presence of Adversaries"! (abstract).

[2016/08/24]: Congratulations to my PhD student, "Jack Lanchantin" who has received the PSB-2017 travel fellowship.

[2016/08/24]: Congratulations to my PhD student, "Ritambhara Singh" who has received the ECCB-2016 travel fellowship.

[2016/06/26]: Congratulations to my PhD student, "Jack Lanchantin" who has been selected into the NIH UVA Biomedical Data Sciences Training Program. Through this program, Jack will work closely with Prof. Stephen S Rich, Director of Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia School of Medicine.

[2016/06/24]: Congratulations to my PhD student, "Beilun Wang" who has received the IBM travel award from ICML16 combio workshop. This is a merit based award selecting 4 awards out of 50 submissions (ranking by the review scores).

[2016/06/24]: Our team had a great showup at ICML16-ComBio workshop, two spotlight talks (rate 20%): (1) SIMULE https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.03468v3 (2): DeepMotif https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01133

[March 2015], UVAToday covered our research @ "COMPUTER SCIENTIST TRANSLATES DATA INTO IMPACT"

[2015/04/12]: Congratulations to my undergraduate thesis student, "Sarah Mohamed" who will join Harvard graduate program since Fall 2016.

2015

[2015/08/18]: Dr. Qi has received an NSF CAREER award! (NSF CAREER awards are extremely competitive and prestigious grants for pre-tenure faculty).

[2015/12/15]: Graduate-Master-Member Zeming Lin has successfully finished his master project defense ! .

[2015/08/12]: Congratulations to my Computer Science Ph.D. student, "Ritambhara Singh" who has just been awarded the UVA L. William Ballard Fellowship for 2015.

[2015/07/30]: Congratulations to my Computer Science Undergraduate, Zeming Lin, who's research was featured in The Spectra, Spring 2015 edition . You can view the full publication here: The Spectra: The Virginia Engineering and Science Research Journal .

[2015/06/23]: Dr. Qi gave an invited talk about "Machine Learning and A Personal Journey for Engineering" at 2015 "UVA Introduction to Engineering (ITE) Program" for pre-college high school students.

[2015/04/29]: Undergraduate-Member Zeming Lin has been awarded with "UVA CS department Undergraduate Reasearch Award" (2 out of more than 300).

[2015/03/18]: Our research is featured ! at (UVAToday) : "Computer Scientist Translates Data into Impact".

[2015/04]: Graduate-Master-Member Sarah Masud Preum has successfully finished her master thesis defense ! .

[2015/04]: Graduate-Master-Member Nicholas Janus has successfully finished his master project presentation ! .

2014

[2014/10/01]: Best Paper Award ! for our paper: J. Gong, P. Asare, J. Lach, Y. Qi, (2014) "Piecewise Linear Dynamical Model for Actions Clustering from Inertial Body Sensors with Considerations of Human Factors", BodyNets 2014 : 9th International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets2014) (BodyNets2014) (PDF) (TalkSlides)

[2014/09/05]: Dr. Qi becomes an affiliated faculty member of The Center for Public Health Genomics at the University of Virginia Medical School.

[2014/06/25]: Dr. Qi gave an invited talk about "Machine Learning and A Personal Journey for Engineering" at 2014 "UVA Introduction to Engineering (ITE) Program" for pre-college high school students.

[2014/03/05]: Dr. Qi gave an invited talk about "Machine Learning for Big Data Complexity in Biomedicine" at 2014 "Genome Sciences Seminar Series" at UVA "Center for public health genomics".

[2014/02/24]: Dr. Qi gave an invited talk about "Advice from Early Career Faculty" at 2014 CRA Career Mentoring Workshop

[2014/02/07]: Dr. Qi invited Prof. Jerry Zhu to give a talk in UVA CS Distinguished Speaker Series.

[2014/02]: Graduate-Member Sarah Masud Preum has been awarded with Big Data Travel Fellowship Award for Collaborative Graduate Student Research.

[2014/01]: Undergraduate-Member Jasdev Singh made an open presentation about his under-thesis "Bridging Data and Dance Music" @ local ACM Chapter. (Youtube Recording of the talk ) (TalkSlide)(GitHub)

2008-- 2013 and Assorted

[Services as Conference PC]: ICML(15-19), ICLR (17-19), NIPS (reviewer 08-19), AISTAT(15-19), ICLR(reviewer 18-19), AAAI(15-18), IJCAI (15,19), MLCB (as chair 09-11, PC 12-14), SIGIR-DC13, EMNLP12, HLT12, ICME(10,11), Grace Hopper Fellowship (08-13,17)

[2013/08]: After working in the industry research lab for five years. Dr. Qi returned back to academia as a faculty member at Computer Science Department in University of Virginia !

Dr. Qi co-Chaired NIPS 2011 MLCB Workshop, got a great list of talks.

Dr. Qi co-Chaired NIPS 2010 MLCB Workshop, Had a very exciting list of presentations.

Dr. Qi Edited the BMC Bioinformatics Journal special issue 2010 for workshop papers from NIPS 2008 and 2009 MLCB Workshop. The special issue got published in Oct 2010.

Dr. Qi co-Chaired NIPS 2009 MLCB Workshop. Had an exciting program this year and invited three top researchers in the field.

Dr. Qi got Promoted to Senior Researcher of NEC Labs America, in June 2013.

Dr. Qi Won the 2nd place in TREC Medical Track 2012 automatic run (out of 82 submissions)

Dr. Qi Won NEC-Labs 2011 Sprouting award (team award; as team lead)

Dr. Qi Won NEC contribution award of IT service BU 2010 (team award, as team member).

Dr. Qi Won NEC-Labs 2010 SEEDs award (4 out of 18 candidate teams! team award; as team lead)

Dr. Qi Won NEC-Labs 2009 SEEDs award (team award; as team lead)

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