Hanzhi Wang awarded for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation

BARC PostDoc researcher Hanzhi Wang has been awarded the 2024 China Computer Federation (CCF) Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. This award recognizes exceptional doctoral dissertation in computer science and is granted annually to only ten recipients who completed their PhDs in China within the past two years. Selection is based on the technical depth and significance of each candidate’s dissertation. Hanzhi, the only female among the recipients, was celebrated alongside her peers at a grand ceremony in Beijing on January 18th 2025.

 

Hanzhi joined BARC as a PostDoc under the supervision of Professor Mikkel Thorup in November 2024. Prior to that, she pursed her PhD at Renmin University of China, focusing on the design of efficient algorithms for estimating random-walk probabilities on large graphs—a fundamental graph analysis problem with broad applications in data mining and machine learning. Hanzhi‘s dissertation, Efficient Computation of Random Walk Probabilities on Large Graphs, addresses four key query problems in random-walk probability estimation: single-node queries, single-target queries, single-source queries, and random-walk meeting probability queries. She improved the best-known complexity bounds for all four problems, with some results achieving optimality. Additionally, she applied her methods to enhance query efficiency in practical applications, including local graph clustering and graph neural networks.

If you would like to connect with Hanzhi you can email her at hawa@di.ku.dk

Topics