Fei Tan

Fei Tan is an Associate Professor (tenured) at East China Normal University. His primary research interests lie in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs). He is dedicated to advancing the foundational principles of model architecture, data synthesis, and learning-to-search algorithms to drive progress and industrial applications of AI in areas such as conversation AI, logical reasoning, AI agents, and scientific research.

Dr. Tan has published over 40 papers in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature Machine Intelligence, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI, and is a co-inventor of multiple U.S. and Chinese patents. His research achievements have been featured by more than 20 media outlets and highlighted by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). His work has been integrated into the high-performance computing systems of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has been applied in products and platforms serving over a billion users globally at companies such as Adobe (Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud), Yahoo (including Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance), RedNote (note search), and SenseTime (including Smart City and Finance).

Previously, Dr. Tan served as a Senior Principal Researcher (Equivalent to R&D Director, reporting directly to the Group Co-founder, Executive Board Member, and Chief Scientist of LLMs) at SenseTime. In the last three years, the language models developed by his team achieved first place in SuperCLUE-NER (among 500+ teams) and ranked in the first tier in the SuperCLUE-Finance benchmark for large financial models. For his contributions to SenseTime's SenseNova large model platform (where he served as the tech lead for R&D and applications in general and financial LLMs, and co-led the development of their 6th generation foundation model), he received the SenseTime Originality Award (the highest honor), the Outstanding Team Award, and a special talent award from Shanghai Municipality for key industrial fields (in the AI sector, one of the three leading industries). In May 2025, as a specially invited representative, he attended a youth talent symposium on artificial intelligence organized by the Shanghai Xuhui District Government, where he delivered a 7-minute keynote speech, offering recommendations for policy design and ecosystem development to advance Shanghai's AI industry.

Dr. Tan received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2019, where his doctoral dissertation was awarded the Joseph Leung Award. He has held positions as a Research Assistant, Intern, and Research Scientist at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Adobe and Yahoo Research, respectively. He has participated in projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, and the U.S. Department of Defense, among others. He has led enterprise-level research and development projects with funding exceeding ten million RMB. He has mentored more than 30 interns and students in both industry and academia.

Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models

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