📧 firstname.lastname996@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Yiru Chen!
My name is Yiru Chen (陈一茹 in Chinese). I am now an Applied Scientist at Adobe AEP GenAI Team. My research interests are LLM, data management, human data interaction, visualization, and interfaces. I am now working on bringing the power of LLMs into databases and visual analytics, creating interfaces that empower users to leverage AI to better understand their data.
I was a visiting scholar in the EPIC Lab at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Aditya Parameswaran, and I earned my Ph.D. in the Database Group at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Eugene Wu.
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 a recipient of the Google Ph.D. Fellowship and was selected as an EECS rising star.Â
News
2/20/2026, I will co-chair the Data-Centric Agentic Systems with Human-in-the-Loop workshop(DASHSys) at VLDB 2026. See you in Boston!
9/17/2024, I give a talk at Adobe!
8/21/2024, I give a talk at Megagon Labs!
3/29/2024, I give a talk titled "Systems for Data Interfaces" at Microsoft Research!
2/6/2024, I am excited to begin my visit to Berkeley EPIC Lab as a visiting scholar!Â
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!Â
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!Â
05/01/2023, PI2 and NL2INTERFACEÂ are open source now! Go try it!
PublicationsÂ
A Decade of Systems for Human Data Interaction
Eugene Wu, Yiru Chen, Haneen Mohammed, Zezhou HuangIn the Information Systems JournalDIG: The Data Interface Grammar
Yiru Chen, Jeffery Tao and Eugene WuIn HILDA '23: Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data AnalyticsTSEXPLAIN: 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]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][Project Page]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][Project Page]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 LuÃs VeigaIn VLDB Workshop on Data Management and Analytics for Medicine and Healthcare 2017[pdf]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, 2018Â
2nd prize in ACM SIGMOD Programming Contest 2017
National Scholarship (highest honor), The Chinese Government 2015, 2017 ·
Founder Scholarship 2016Â
HuaWei Scholarship 2017Â
Pacemaker to Merit Student, Peking University, 2017Â
Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award, Peking University, 2017Â
Outstanding Student Leader In EECS, Peking University, 2015Â
1st Prize Chinese Mathematical Olympiad in Jiangsu Province (CMOP) 2014, 2013Â
Recommended Early Admission into Peking University 2013
Service
Workshop Chair: DASHSys at VLDB 2026
Program Committee Member: SIGMOD 2025-27, VLDB Demonstration 2024, BigVis 2024, VLDB Demonstration 2023, BigVis 2023, SDM 2023, DASFAA 2023, VLDB Demonstration 2022, SOSP Artifact Evaluation 2021
Session Chair: VLDB 2022
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
Teaching
COMS W6113 TOPICS IN DATABASE RESEARCH, Spring ’23, Columbia University
COMS W6998 Systems for Human Data Interaction, Spring ’20, Columbia University
COMS W4111 Introduction to Databases, Spring ’19, Columbia University
COMS W4231 Analysis of Algorithms, Fall ’19, Columbia University
ENGI E4900 Summer Masters Research, Summer ’20, Columbia UniversityÂ
COMS W3998 Undergraduate Research, Spring ’20, Columbia University