Da Xu

Greetings! I am Da Xu, and I extend a warm welcome to my homepage. At present, I am a Staff AI Engineer at LinkedIn Network Growth AI. Prior to my current position, I was a Machine Learning Manager in the Search & Recommendation team at Walmart Labs.

Over the years, I have been actively involved in driving real-world ML productions, developing foundational solutions for emerging issues, and bridging the gap between academic research and practical recommender systems (Recsys). Some of my research efforts have been published in NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and several applicational works have been published in KDD, WSDM, and WWW.

Scholarly Interests

My interest in Recsys and industrial ML has motivated me to explore the fundamentals of these domains. I am lucky to come across many scholars and practitioners share similar interests, which motivates me to organize events and bring together individuals to investigate various problems. Some of the events I have organized include the INFORMS session on “Causal Inference Analysis for Information Retrieval”, the 1st and 2nd “Workshop on Decision Making for Information Retrieval (IR) and Recsys”, and the tutorials on “Theoretical Foundation of IR and Recsys” and “Advances in Simulation Technologies for Web Applications”.

While my top priority is to fulfill my job duties in the industry, many of the production problems I encountered have broader implications for the whole academic community. Going forward, I aim to keep contributing more foundational research, joining community efforts, and writing blog posts for readers who share my interest.