Zhengyi Yang

Who I am

I am currently an Associate Lecturer (Teaching and Reseach) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). I also serve as a Visiting Database System Scientist at Enmotech Data AU and Chief Scientist at Euler AI. I completed my PhD in Computer Science from UNSW under the supervision of Prof. Xuemin Lin (Member of the Academia Europaea, IEEE Fellow) and Prof. Wenjie Zhang (ACS Fellow, ARC Future Fellow) within the Data and Knowledge Research Group. Before that, I received my MEng in Mathematical Computation (First Class Honours) from the Computer Science Department of University College London (UCL), where I was awarded the IBM sponsorship for the Best Undergraduate Final Year Project (First Place). In 2018 and 2021, I interned at Alibaba DAMO Academy and Google, respectively.

Stuff I do

My expertise lies in developing efficient and scalable algorithms and systems for managing and processing large-scale data, including graph data, relational data, spatial-temporal data, and high-dimensional data, etc. I'm also interested in information retrieval, distributed systems, machine learning, AI meets databases (AI4DB/DB4AI), and AI for social good (AI4SG).

• Programming

  

• Data Analysis

  

• Machine Learning

  

• Web development

  

Selected Publications

Full List, Google Scholar, DBLP, ResearchGate, ORCID

• PhoebeDB: A Disk-Based RDBMS Kernel for High-Performance and Cost-Effective OLTP (EDBT 2025)
• Accelerating Core Decomposition in Billion-Scale Hypergraphs (SIGMOD 2025) [Code]
• A Cluster-Based Approach to kNN Join over Batch-Dynamic High-Dimensional Data (ADMA 2024) - Best Student Paper [Slides]
• TATKC: A Temporal Graph Neural Network for Fast Approximate Temporal Katz Centrality Ranking (WWW 2024) [Video] [Code]
• HGMatch: A Match-by-Hyperedge Approach for Subgraph Matching on Hypergraphs (ICDE 2023) [Slides] [Full Paper]
• Efficient kNN Join over Dynamic High-dimensional Data (ADC 2022) - Best Student Paper [Slides]
• HUGE: An Efficient and Scalable Subgraph Enumeration System (SIGMOD 2021) [Slides] [Full Paper]
• FAST: FPGA-based Subgraph Matching on Massive Graphs (ICDE 2021) [Slides] [Full Paper]
• An Empirical Study on Recent Graph Database Systems (KSEM 2020) - Best Student Paper [Slides] [GitHub]
• Distributed Subgraph Matching on Timely Dataflow (VLDB 2019) [PDF] [Slides] [GitHub] [Full Paper]

Teaching & Supervision

Teaching

• Lecturer-in-Charge: COMP9311 Database Systems (22T2,23T2,24T2,24T3)
• Lecturer: COMP9311 Database Systems (23T3), DATA1001 Introduction to Data Science and Decisions (23T2,24T2)
• Guest Lecturer: COMP9313 Big Data Management (23T3), 42913 Social and Information Network Analysis (24S1@UTS), COMP6210 Big Data (24S2@Macquarie University)

Supervision

I'm currently only accepting honours/project students within UNSW due to a heavy HDR workload. Below is the list of students I am supervising now (full student list).

• PhD Students: Zhuoqing Xu, Diya Yan, Sijia Xu
• MPhil Students: Ruiqing Yan, Bocheng Han, Weiyuan Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Huangleshuai He
• Honours Students: Nicolaas Van Der Merwe, Alexander Garrity, Minh Truong, Merry Rosalie
• Reseach Project Students: Mingchen Ju, Yiming Huang, Kaixin Gu, Ye Li

Awards & Grants

Awards

• Best Student Paper Award, ADMA - 2024
• Excellence Service Award, APWeb-WAIM - 2024
• Best Student Paper Award, ADC - 2022
• Best Student Paper Award, KSEM - 2020
• Tuition Fee Scholarship plus a Research Stipend, UNSW - 2018
• IBM sponsorship of Best Undergraduate Final Year Project (First Place), UCL - 2018
• Computer Science App Award, UCL - 2014

Grants

• Jan 2024 - Jan 2026, Industry Grant from Venus Intelligence Technology: Data-Driven AI in Business Intelligence, Lead CI, AU$74,964
• Feb 2025 - Feb 2026, Award for SIGMA Trading Management: Sigma Trading Research Award, Lead CI, AU$150,000
• Oct 2023 - Oct 2024, Research Credits for Google Cloud Platform: Google Cloud Research Credits, Solo CI, US$7,840.
• Jun 2023 - Dec 2025, Industry Grant from Enmotech Data AU: Just-in-time Compilation for High-Performance RDBMS Runtime, Lead CI, AU$527,260

Services & Talks

Professional Services

Organisation

• Program Committee Chair: LSGDA@VLDB2024, LSGDA@VLDB2025
• Publication Chair: APWeb-WAIM 2024
• Proceedings Chair: ADC 2023
• Local Chair: ADC 2022
• Session Chair: ADC 2022, VLDB 2022, DASFAA 2023, APWeb-WAIM 2024, ADC 2024

Program Committee Member

• ICDE 2025
• WWW 2025
• KDD 2025
• CIKM 2021 (Short), 2022 (Short), 2024, 2025
• DASFAA 2023, 2024, 2025
• APWeb-WAIM 2024, 2025
• WISE 2021
• ADMA 2023, 2024
• ADC 2022, 2023

Editorial Board

• Guest Editor: Applied Sciences ( SI1, SI2 )
• Reviewer: TKDE, VLDB Journal, World Wide Web Journal, Theoretical Computer Science, Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, Frontiers of Computer Science, Entropy

External Reviewer

• SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, WWW, TODS, etc

Talks

• "Graph Pattern Matching: Algorithms and Applications”, Hunan University, Sep 2024; Southeast University, Dec 2024; Nanjing University, April 2025
• "Graph Computation in the Big Data Era - Applications and Algorithms", Research Cloud Frontiers of Science Online Lectures, Jun 2021 (in Simplified Chinese/Mandarin) [Bilibili] [Youtube]
• "Building a Distributed Graph Database in Rust", Rust Meetup Sydney @ Atlassian, Feb 2020 [Slides]