Hi, I'm Yiru Chen.

My name is Yiru Chen (陈一茹 in Chinese). I am now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley with the EPIC Lab and I am also a Ph.D. student in the Database Group at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Eugene Wu. 

My research interests are databases, human data interaction, visualization, and machine learning. I am now working on how to automatically optimize the system backend for interactive data visualizations and also how to automatically learn the interactive visualization interfaces from queries.  

I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science, SUMMA CUM LAUDE, and Economics(minor) at Peking University in 2018. At PKU, I used to work on topic models and in-database machine learning with Prof. Bin Cui.

I am awarded the Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Structure Data and Databases Management.

News

11/29/2023, I give a talk titled "Towards Democratizing Data Interfaces" at Umass Rising Stars in CS lecture series!

09/01/2023, I am honored to be selected as EECS rising star 2023! 

06/18/2023, DIG(the data interface grammar) is an intermediate representation of the interface analysis. I will present how DIG bridges the interface and analysis at hilda@SIGMOD 2023! 

05/01/2023, PI2 and NL2INTERFACE  are open source now! Go try it!

04/05/2023, I give a talk on TSExplain at ICDE with code released here!

03/10/2023, I give a talk on "learned interactive visualization interfaces" at North East Database Day!

09/19/2022, Our NL2INTERFACE  can automatically generate interactive visualization interfaces from natural language queries!  I will present this work at the NLVIS workshop at the IEEE Visualization Conference 2022. 

Publications 

DIG: The Data Interface Grammar

Yiru Chen, Jeffery Tao and Eugene WuIn HILDA '23: Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data Analytics

[pdf]

TSEXPLAIN: Explaining Aggregated Time Series by Surfacing Evolving Contributors

Yiru Chen, and Silu HuangIn The IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2023[pdf][code][Technical Report]

NL2INTERFACE: Interactive Visualization Interface Generation from Natural Language Queries

Yiru Chen, Ryan Li, Austin Mac, Tianbao Xie, Tao Yu, and Eugene WuIn IEEE Visualization Conference NLVIZ Workshop 2022[pdf][code]

PI2: End-to-end Interactive Visualization Interface Generation from Queries

Yiru Chen, and Eugene WuIn Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data 2022[pdf][talk][demo][Technical Report][code]

Demonstration of PI2: Interactive Visualization Interface Generation for SQL Analysis in Notebook

Jeffery Tao, Yiru Chen, and Eugene WuIn Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data 2022[pdf][talk][demo][code]

TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series

Yiru Chen, and Silu HuangIn Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data 2021[pdf][talk][code]

Monte Carlo Tree Search for Generating Interactive Data Analysis Interfaces

Yiru Chen, and Eugene WuIn The AAAI Workshop on Intelligent Process Automation (IPA-20) 2020[pdf]

DeepBase: Deep Inspection of Neural Networks

Thibault Sellam, Kevin Lin, Ian Huang, Yiru Chen, Michelle Yang, Carl Vondrick, and Eugene WuIn Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data 2019[pdf]

Deep Neural Inspection Using DeepBase

Yiru Chen, Yiliang Shi, Boyuan Chen, Thibault Sellam, Carl Vondrick, and Eugene WuIn NeurIPS LearnSys Workshop 2018[pdf]

A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Explainable Recommendation

Xiting Wang, Yiru Chen, Jie Yang, Le Wu, Zhengtao Wu, and Xing XieIn IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2018[pdf]

MLog: Towards Declarative In-Database Machine Learning

Xupeng Li, Bin Cui, Yiru Chen, Wentao Wu, and Ce ZhangIn Proc. VLDB Endow. 2017[pdf]

Sys-TM: A Fast and General Topic Modeling System

Yingxia Shao, Xupeng Li, Yiru Chen, Lele Yu, and Bin CuiIn IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 2019[pdf]

psfgan: a generative adversarial network system for separating quasar point sources and host galaxy light

Dominic Stark, Barthelemy Launet, Kevin Schawinski, Ce Zhang, Michael Koss, M Dennis Turp, Lia F Sartori, Hantian Zhang, Yiru Chen, and Anna K WeigelIn Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2018[pdf]

On-Demand Service-Based Big Data Integration: Optimized for Research Collaboration

Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Yiru Chen, Ashish Sharma, Helen Galhardas, Peter Van Roy, and Luís VeigaIn VLDB Workshop on Data Management and Analytics for Medicine and Healthcare 2017[pdf]

Projects

Automatically learn interactive visualization interfaces from query logs or natural language queries. 


Surface Evolving Explanations for Time Series at a interactive speed. 


Honors

EECS Rising star, 2023

Google PhD Fellowship 2021

Travel Awards: SIGMOD 2023, ICDE 2023, SIGMOD 2022, VIS 2022, VLDB 2021, CRA-W 2021

Beijing Outstanding Undergraduate Award, 2018 

2nd prize in ACM SIGMOD Programming Contest 2017

National Scholarship (highest honor), The Chinese Government 2015, 2017 ·

Founder Scholarship 2016 

HuaWei Scholarship 2017 

Pacemaker to Merit Student, Peking University, 2017 

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award, Peking University, 2017 

Outstanding Student Leader In EECS, Peking University, 2015 

1st Prize Chinese Mathematical Olympiad in Jiangsu Province (CMOP) 2014, 2013 

Recommended Early Admission into Peking University 2013

Service

Session Chair: VLDB 2022

Program Committee Member: VLDB Demonstration 2024,  BigVis 2024, VLDB Demonstration 2023, BigVis 2023, SDM 2023, DASFAA 2023, VLDB Demonstration 2022, SOSP Artifact Evaluation 2021

Reviewer: WSDM Demonstration 2023, TKDE 2022

Student Volunteer: SIGMOD 2023, ICDE 2023, VIS 2022

MS Admissions Committee, Columbia University, 2022

Graduate Application Mentor, Columbia University, 2020

 CS Department Representative - Engineering Graduate Student Council, Columbia University, 2018