Yong Zheng

Dr. Yong Zheng is an Associate Professor and tenured faculty member in the Department of Information Technology and Management (ITM) at the College of Computing, Illinois Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from DePaul University. His research focuses on Data Science, AI, Recommender Systems, and Human-Centric Computing. He directs the Center for Decision Making and Optimization (DMO) and co-directs the ITM PhD program.

Dr. Zheng’s academic roles include service as General Chair for ACM HT 2025, Track Co-Chair for multiple conferences, and editorial roles at journals like Education and Information Technologies (EAIT) and Frontiers in Big Data. He has received awards such as the Springer Nature Editorial Contribution Award (2025) and NSF grants for conference participation and research.

His research spans multi-objective optimization in finance, context-aware recommendations, educational technologies, and FinTech. He has developed open-source libraries like CARSKit, DeepCARSKit, and MOPO-LSI. His work has been published in top venues including ACM RecSys, IUI, and SIGIR.

Dr. Zheng teaches courses in Data Science, AI, and Applied Data Analytics. He advises numerous PhD and master’s students, focusing on topics like multi-criteria recommendations and financial systems. His industry collaborations include roles at Pandora Media and Morningstar, Inc.