Joined department: 2008

Yao is currently a PhD student in the computer science department of Purdue University. He received Master's degree from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(2008) and Bachelor's degree from Nanjing University(2004). He worked at Samsung China Research Center as an assistant research fellow from 2004 to 2005. His research interests include statistical machine learning, structured probabilistic framework for complex knowledge representation and reasoning, computational learning theory, approximation algorithms, randomized algorithms, optimization and iterative methods, philosophy of probability, and machine learning applications in computational biology, computer vision and natural language processing.