Alumni Kaleidoscope: Junfeng Pan - PhD(COMP)

As an engineering leader at Facebook, Junfeng leads the company's ads ranking and later on, user ranking and engagement. He is proud to have designed, built, and spearheaded the growth of new and advanced machine learning algorithms and systems for ads optimization, user engagement and growth optimization at Facebook.

Junfeng is an active member of the research community and many of his papers have been published in top-tier conferences and journals as well as cited in academia, textbooks and industry. He is a senior program committee member for nearly 30 research conferences and a regular reviewer for over ten academic journals. In 2005, he was awarded the Precision, Performance and Creativity Awards at the ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Cup, one of the highest honors in the field. Most recently he was featured in an interview in the magazine American Scientist in 2013.

Junfeng looks back fondly on his three years at HKUST. "I am thankful for my advisor and many professors and friends at HKUST. Here we have studied, conducted research and had lots of fun together. The past three years turned out to be very fruitful for me. I love the sea view and sunrise from my dorm window. I love the people, the library, the lab, the food, and everything here at HKUST!"