DAC Student Spotlight: Jianfeng He

Along his educational path, Jianfeng He learned an important lesson: Having a good advisor should be the number one priority in choosing a Ph.D. program. The opportunity to work with Chang-Tien Lu drew him to Virginia Tech and the Discovery Analytics Center after spending a short period of time at another university.

He’s focus is on data analysis of social media and he is currently working on image editing based on user requests and text classification based on machine learning.

This research builds upon an interest that began while He was an undergraduate majoring in digital media technology at the Central China Normal University and required to learn media design software, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and MAYA.

“As an undergraduate I was dealing with the media manually, now I want to understand it through AI,” said He.

As a master’s degree student in computer science at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, He researched cross-modal retrieval and had several papers published on this topic, including “Multi-label double-layer learning for cross-modal retrieval” (Neurocomputing, January 2018); “Adaptively Unified Semi-supervised Learning for Cross-Modal Retrieval” (proceedings of the 2017 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) “Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval Using Social Tag Information Towards Mobile Applications” (2017 International Workshop on Mobility Analytics for Spatio-temporal and Social Data); and “Cross-modal Retrieval by Real Label Partial Least Squares” (proceedings of the 2016 ACM international conference on Multimedia, October 2016).

He came to the United States about a year ago and joined DAC in the Spring 2019 semester.

“What I like most about being at DAC,” said He, “is the friendly student-faculty relationship and student-student relationship.”

He said he has received much appreciated help not only with his research but with navigating many of the things related to day to day living: banking, parking permits, and how to enjoy life in the Northern Virginia area.

Among the things He enjoys doing in his free time are going to the gym, playing badminton, and trying new restaurants.

After earning his Ph.D., He would like to return to China to teach and continue his research at a university there.