Hanghang Tong, a 2009 Ph.D. alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, has won the prestigious Tao Li Award from the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM).

The award recognizes researchers who have received their Ph.D. in the past 10 years and have demonstrated significant impact in research, contribution, leadership and services in the areas of data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Tong is now an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on large-scale data mining and machine learning, especially for graph data with applications. He has received several awards, including the SDM/IBM Early Career Data Mining Research Award (2018), National Science Foundation CAREER award (2017) and ICDM 2015 Highest-Impact Paper Award.

Tong has more than 100 publications and refereed articles, and is an associate editor of SIGKDD Explorations, an action editor of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and an associate editor of Neurocomputing Journal.

Prior to joining the University of Illinois, Tong served on the faculties of Arizona State University and the City University of New York, as a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and as a post-doctoral fellow at CMU.