Director

Language Technology Lab, Alibaba DAMO Academy

Rong Yu

Dr. Yu Rong is an IEEE Senior Member and recognized as a high-level overseas talent by Shenzhen. He received his Ph.D. in System Engineering and Engineering Management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016, where he also conducted postdoctoral research. In June 2017, he joined Tencent AI Lab as a principal researcher. He joined Alibaba DAMO Academy in June 2024, focusing on large language model and AI for Science research.

His primary research interests are in graph deep learning and large language model, with specific applications in AI for Science domain. His papers have been cited over 8,200 times on Google Scholar with a single paper receiving over 1,500 citations. His H-index stands at 38. Two of his papers (ICLR 2020, WWW 2020) were selected as the most influential papers by PaperDigest. He has also been listed among Stanford/Elsevier's Top 2% Scientists and ranked second in the mainland China machine learning subfield of the AMiner Rising Star list (2020-2023).

In Tencent, He was responsible for building the molecular property prediction module of the Tencent iDrug platform, one of its five foundational modules, which encompasses 42 self-developed models and has received over 100,000 calls.

He proposed the GROVER model, a large molecular property prediction model based on a self-supervised learning paradigm, which was showcased at the NVIDIA GTC 2020 technical sharing. Additionally, he organized a team that participated in the Second Open Catalyst Challenge in NeurIPS 2022 and won the championship.