Jason Xurong Liang is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. He earned a Bachelor of Computer Science with First-Class Honors from the same university in 2022.

His Ph.D. research focuses on efficient lightweight recommender systems, advised by Assoc. Prof. Rocky Tong Chen and Prof. Hongzhi Yin. His broader interests include data mining, recommender systems, user modeling, and natural language processing.

He had a great summer at Amazon in 2024, where he worked with Dr. Julien Monteil, Dr. Vu Nguyen, Dr. Vuong Le and Dr. Paul Albert to explore the possibility of leveraging LLM to tackle the long-standing user cold-start problem in video streaming platforms.

When he is not immersed in his studies📖 or in front of a computer👨‍💻, he enjoys traveling🏖️, fishing🎣, and watching movies🍿.

📝 Publications

• RecSys 2025 In-context Learning for Addressing User Cold-start in Sequential Movie Recommenders, Xurong Liang, Vu Nguyen, Vuong Le, Paul Albert, Julien Monteil
• TOIS 2025 Lightweight Embeddings with Graph Rewiring for Collaborative Filtering, Xurong Liang, Tong Chen, Wei Yuan, Hongzhi Yin
• SIGIR 2024 Lightweight Embeddings for Graph Collaborative Filtering, Xurong Liang, Tong Chen, Lizhen Cui, Yang Wang, Meng Wang, Hongzhi Yin
• KDD 2024 Hate Speech Detection with Generalizable Target-aware Fairness, Tong Chen, Danny Wang, Xurong Liang, Marten Risius, Gianluca Demartini, Hongzhi Yin
• ICDM 2023 Learning Compact Compositional Embeddings via Regularized Pruning for Recommendation, Xurong Liang, Tong Chen, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Jianxin Li, Hongzhi Yin

💼 Internships

• Oct 2024 - May 2025, Applied Scientist Internship, Amazon, Australia. Conducted research on In-context Learning for Addressing User Cold-start in Sequential Recommenders, mentored by Dr. Julien Monteil, Dr. Vu Nguyen, Dr. Vuong Le, and Dr. Paul Albert.

🎖 Awards

• 2022 Dean’s Commendation for Academic Excellence — Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons), University of Queensland, Australia.
  • Awarded for achieving a grade point average (cGPA) of 6.60 (out of 7.0) or higher in a single semester.
• 2019 - Jul 2021 Dean’s Commendation for Academic Excellence — Bachelor of Computer Science, University of Queensland, Australia.
  • Awarded for achieving a grade point average (cGPA) of 6.60 (out of 7.0) or higher in a single semester.
• 2021 Cloud Computing INFS3208 Best Project Runner-up Award, University of Queensland, Australia.
• 2020 Prentice Scholar, University of Queensland, Australia.
  • Awarded to undergraduate Computer Science and Information Technology students whose academic performance ranks within the top 5% of their cohort.
• 2017 Subject Prize Award – Information Processing and Technology, Indooroopilly State High School, Australia.
  • Awarded for ranking 1st in the course cohort.

🤑 Scholarships

• 2023 - 2026 Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship
• 2024 Google Research Travel Scholarship
• 2022 UQ International Onshore Merit Scholarship
• 2021 Winter Research Scholarship

📖 Education

• 2023 - now, Doctor of Philosophy, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
• 2022, Undergraduate (Honors), University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
• 2019 - 2021, Undergraduate, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
• 2016 - 2018, Indooroopilly State High School, Brisbane, Australia.

🧑‍🏫 Teaching

• 2022 - now, INFS7901 – Database Principles.
  • Gave weekly practical and tutorial sessions and was responsible for assignment and exam paper marking.
• 2023 - now, INFS3208/INFS7208 - Cloud Computing.
  • Gave weekly practical and tutorial sessions and was responsible for assignment and exam paper marking.

More about me…

Wanna get to know more about me? Have a look at my CV 😎.

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