Dake Zhang

PhD Student in Computer Science

University of Waterloo

Biography

Behind every beautiful thing, there is some kind of pain.
宝剑锋从磨砺出，梅花香自苦寒来。

Hi, I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo advised by Prof. Mark Smucker and a member of the Data Systems Group. My research interests include Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. My recent work is about the mitigation of online misinformation and biases. Before that, I received my Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and my Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Wuhan University.

Download my resumé.

Interests

Information Retrieval
Natural Language Processing
Artificial Intelligence

Education

PhD Student in Computer Science, 2025 Exp.

University of Waterloo
MMath in Computer Science, 2022

University of Waterloo
BSc in Software Engineering, 2020

Wuhan University

Experience

Research Assistant

Information Retrieval Group, University of Waterloo

Sep 2020 – Present Waterloo, ON, Canada

This research group is led by Prof. Mark Smucker.
Mitigate online health misinformation.
- TREC Health Misinformation Treck
Augment news articles to moderate biases.

Teaching Assistant

Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

May 2021 – Present Waterloo, ON, Canada

Fall 2022: CS486/686 Introduction to AI, delivered by Blake Vanberlo.
Spring 2022: CS486/686 Introduction to AI, delivered by Prof. Jesse Hoey.
Winter 2022: CS486/686 Introduction to AI, delivered by Blake Vanberlo.
Fall 2021: CS486/686 Introduction to AI, delivered by Prof. Alice Gao.
Spring 2021: CS486/686 Introduction to AI, delivered by Prof. Alice Gao.

Machine Learning Intern

Douyin (TikTok in China), Bytedance

May 2020 – Sep 2020 Beijing, China

Mentors: ZHANG Keyang, YANG Xuecheng
Assisted in adjusting the Recommender System to support the launch of Friend Tab.
Experimented and deployed personalization strategies to promote interactions (e.g., liking, commenting, sharing, etc.) among friends.
Applied Machine Learning algorithms to predict the intimacy among users, which improved friend interactions per user by 1%.

Publications

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Dake Zhang (2022). Reducing Health Misinformation in Search Results. In UWSpace Theses.

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Dake Zhang, Amir Vakili Tahami, Mustafa Abualsaud, Mark D. Smucker (2022). Learning Trustworthy Web Sources to Derive Correct Answers and Reduce Health Misinformation in Search. In ACM SIGIR 2022.

PDF Cite Code Video

Mustafa Abualsaud, Irene Xiangyi Chen, Kamyar Ghajar, Linh Nhi Phan Minh, Mark D. Smucker, Amir Vakili Tahami, Dake Zhang (2022). UWaterlooMDS at the TREC 2021 Health Misinformation Track. In TREC.