Yixin Chen received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. His Ph.D advisor is Professor Benjamin W. Wah, ECE, UIUC. Starting from September 2005, he is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering of the Washington University in St Louis. He received his M.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001, and his B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1999. He was admitted to the Special Class for Gifted Young of USTC in 1995, at the age of 16.

He has a number of awards:

Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, 2007

Early Career Principal Investigator Award, Department of Energy, 2006

First Prize, Optimization Track, 5th International Planning Competition, for the MaxPlan planner, ICAPS-06, June 9, 2006.

First Prize, Satisficing Track, 5th International Planning Competition, for the SGPlan5 planner, ICAPS-06, June 9, 2006.
 
Best Paper Award, 17th IEEE International Conference on Tools for Artificial Intelligence, November 2005.
 
1st Prize, Suboptimal Temporal Metric Track, 4th International Planning Competition, for the SGPlan planner, ICAPS-04, June 6, 2004.
  
2nd Prize, Suboptimal Propostional Track, 4th International Planning Competition, for the SGPlan planner, ICAPS-04, June 6, 2004.
 
Lotfi Zadeh Outstanding Paper Award, 3rd International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 2004. Only 3 papers out of about 1600 submitted papers won this award in ICMLC 04. 
 
Best Paper Award Nomination, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, 2004. Only 10 papers were nominated for the best paper award in IAT 04.  
  
Phi Kappa Phi, 2004.

Chancellor's List, 2004.

National Collegiate Computer Science Award, by the United States Achievement Academy, 2003.

He has provided the following service to the professional society:

Programming Committee Member, KDD 2007-2008, PAKDD 2006, ICDM 2006, ICTAI 2006, WI 2006-2007, ICAPS 2006-2007, IEEE-GrC 2006-2008, AAAI 2005-2008.

Editorial Board, IEEE TKDE, 2008-.

Austrian Science Fund reviewer, 2007.

National Science Foundation review panelist, 2005.   

Reviewer for IEEE Trans. on Sensor Networks, 2008; IEEE TKDE, 2007; AIJ, 2007; Soft Computing, 2007; IEEE Internet Computing, 2006; AI Communications, 2006; the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Elsevier, 2005; the Computer Networks Journal, Elsevier, 2005; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, 2004; Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer-Verlag, 2003; ICTAI 2003; International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, 2003; Evolutionary Optimization, X. Yao and R. Sarker (ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.  

In his spare time, his current interests include reading, tennis, zen practice, and movies.