Hi, thank you for visiting. I am a researcher and an associate professor in Osaka University. My research interests include web mining, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and latent variable models. Particularly, I am currently working on 1) user intent disentanglement in e-commerce platforms, a branch of recommendation system research, 2) political information modeling in social media data.

I obtained my PhD in computer science from the University of Adelaide in 2016, supervised by Dr. Claudia Szabo and Prof. Michael Sheng. Before joining Osaka University, I worked as a postdoc in Nanyang Technological University and Kyoto University. I publish my research in prestigious journals and conferences, such as ACM TKDD, ACM TIST, ACM TWEB, IEEE TCSS, KAIS, KBS, Information Systems, WWWJ, ACM SIGIR, ECIR, PAKDD, ASONAM, and WISE. I won the best paper award in KSEM 2021. I have served as program committee member in conferences such as CIKM and ICDM.

I recently received an interview from Global Outlook, The University of Osaka, about my research vision and living in Osaka. You can check the article.

Short Biography

2024 - Now: Associate Professor in Osaka University, Japan
2021 - 2024: Specially Appointed Lecturer in Osaka University, Japan
2019 - 2021: Specially Appointed Researcher in Osaka University, Japan
2017 - 2019: Specially Appointed Researcher in Kyoto University, Japan
2016 - 2017: Research fellow in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2013 - 2016: Ph.D. student in Computer Science, the University of Adelaide, Australia
2011 - 2012: Master student in Computer Science, the University of Adelaide, Australia
2003 - 2010: Bachelor student in Computer Science, University of New South Wales, Australia

Publications

[Full Publication List] [My DBLP Page] [My Google Scholar Page]

Codes and data for some papers are available.

Selected Recent Publications

• Yanan Cai, Zhongrui Zhao, Zhigang Lu, Ickjai Lee, Wei Emma Zhang, Jason Xue, Yihong Zhang, Shuchao Pang, and Wei Xiang, 2026: AI Alignment through a Game-theoretic Lens: A Survey. The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP 2026, Budapest, Hungary. (accepted)
• Aoran Chen, Guanyu Cao, Shengzhe Jiao, Zhi Li, Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2026: Beyond Dense Propagation: A Remove-and-Reintegrate Framework for Debiased Short-Video Recommendation. The 35th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management CIKM 2026, Rome, Italy. (accepted)
• Yihong Zhang, Takahiro Hara, and Lina Yao, 2025: Disentangling Political Bias in Social Media Data through Multi-task Embedding Learning. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. IEEE. Volume 13(1), pp. 196-207.
• Shengzhe Jiao, Yihong Zhang, and Takahiro Hara, 2025: Multi-task Multi-modal Graph Neural Network for Recommender System. Knowledge and Information Systems. Springer. Volume 67(9), pp. 8059–8084.
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2025: Multi-role Social Behavior Modeling in Content-free News Recommendation. World Wide Web. Springer. Volume 28(3), pp. 33:1-20.
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2025: Modeling Social Behavior in Collaborative Filtering. Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval SIGIR 2025, Padua, Italy, pp.1954-1963.
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2025: Extracting Political Interest Model from Interaction Data Based on Novel Word-level Bias Assignment. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Voume 16(1), pp. 18:1-21.
• Yihong Zhang, Masumi Shirakawa, and Takahiro Hara, 2024: Word-Level Political Sentiments Inferred from Social Media and Application in Recommendation Diversification. ACM Transactions on the Web. Volume 19(1), pp. 4:1-26.
• Zhi Li, Daichi Amagata, Yihong Zhang, Takahiro Hara, Shuichiro Haruta, Kei Yonekawa and Mori Kurokawa, 2024: Mutual Information-based Preference Disentangling and Transferring for Non-overlapped Multi-target Cross-domain Recommendations. Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval SIGIR 2024, Washington D.C., USA, pp. 2124-2133
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2024: Joint Knowledge Graph Approach for Event Participant Prediction with Social Media Retweeting. Knowledge and Information Systems. Springer. Volume 66(3), pp. 2115-2133.
• Yihong Zhang, Xiu Susie Fang, and Takahiro Hara, 2023: Evolving Social Media Background Representation with Frequency Weights and Co-occurrence Graphs. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. ACM. Volume 17(7), pp. 95:1-95:17.
• Yihong Zhang and Takahiro Hara, 2023: Explainable Integration of Social Media Background in a Dynamic Neural Recommender. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. ACM. Volume 17(3), pp. 40:1-40:14.
• Yue Zhao, Yihong Zhang, Daichi Amagata, and Takahiro Hara, 2023: POI Recommendation by Learning Short-, Long- and Mid-Term Preferences through GNN. Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management MDM’23, Singapore, pp. 1-10.
• Zhi Li, Daichi Amagata, Yihong Zhang, Takuya Maekawa, Takahiro Hara, Kei Yonekawa, and Mori Kurokawa, 2022: HML4Rec: Hierarchical Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation in Flash Sale E-commerce. Knowledge-Based Systems. Elsevier. Volume 255, pp. 109674.
• Yihong Zhang, Panote Siriaraya, Yukiko Kawai, and Adam Jatowt, 2020: Predicting Time and Location of Future Crimes with Recommendation Methods. Knowledge-Based Systems. Elsevier. Volume 210, pp. 106503.
• Yihong Zhang, Panote Siriaraya, Yukiko Kawai, and Adam Jatowt, 2020: Automatic Latent Street Type Discovery from Web Open Data. Information Systems. Elsevier. Volume 92, pp. 101536. [pdf] [code and data]

Professional Services

[Full List of Professional Services]

Conference Organization

• 2026 The 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, PC member
• 2026 The 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, PC member
• 2026 The 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, PC member
• 2025 The 25th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, PC member
• 2025 The 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, PC member
• 2025 The 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, PC member
• 2025 The 19th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, PC member
• 2024 The 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, PC member
• 2024 The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, PC member
• 2024 The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, PC member

Journal Reviewer

• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE)
• ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM)
• Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier)
• Knowledge and Information Systems (Springer)
• World Wide Web (Springer)

Grants

2024-2025 Osaka University Graduate School of Information Science and Technology Start-up Program Grant JPY 500K for project Social Behavior Modeling and Governance in Online Shopping Platforms

2022-2023 Osaka University Graduate School of Information Science and Technology Start-up Program Grant JPY 500K for project Analyzing Social Media for Modeling Human Partition in Emerging Events

Personal

Hobbies: reading novel (especially modern Japanese novels), hiking, playing guitar and ukulele