Xifeng Yan

Xifeng Yan is the Narayanamurti Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he leads research in artificial intelligence, data mining, and foundation models. He holds the prestigious Venkatesh Narayanamurti Chair since 2008 and directs multiple NSF-funded research projects including SmartFlow, Graph Information System, and Knowledge Graph Query Processing.

Dr. Yan's research focuses on developing fundamental concepts and new principles of data mining, designing intelligent algorithms, and building scalable systems. His current concentrations include modeling and mining large-scale heterogeneous graphs, structural analysis of texts, and intelligent solutions to cross-domain problems in bioinformatics, business intelligence, computer security, and social science. He has pioneered work in transformer-based time series forecasting and is the co-inventor of ADL/Mica, an agent-first approach to conversational AI assistants.

His recent work includes the Open-Qwen2VL multimodal language model, which has been downloaded over 66,000 times on HuggingFace, and ADL (A Declarative Language for Agent-Based Chatbots), which simplifies chatbot development through natural language programming. Dr. Yan has received numerous honors including the NSF CAREER Award, IBM Invention Achievement Award, and IEEE ICDM 10-Year Highest Impact Paper Award.

As an educator, he teaches advanced courses on foundation models, conversational AI, and artificial intelligence, mentoring numerous PhD students who have gone on to successful careers at leading tech companies and academic institutions. His research has significant applications across finance, healthcare, and scientific discovery, reflecting his commitment to advancing both theoretical foundations and practical implementations of AI technologies.