I am a researcher in computer science, with my established research centered around data mining, i.e., extracting and utilizing patterns from large-scale data, usually with machine learning models. Computer science is also one of my hobbies, and I am interested in most topics relevant to it, especially SysOps and full-stack development.

I am building my teaching experience, where my foundational understanding of the subject matter comes from both my research experience and the knowledge I gained during my hobbyist computer science exploration.

Research
Trajectory representation learning is one of my established research topics. It aims to learn representations of trajectories (of vehicle, human, or vessel, etc.) that are universal across various downstream tasks. This also extends to building a multi-task/foundational model for trajectories that can perform various tasks at once.
IEEE TKDE | 2025
UniTE: A Survey and Unified Pipeline for Pre-training Spatiotemporal Trajectory Embeddings
Yan Lin, Zeyu Zhou, Yicheng Liu, Haochen Lv, Haomin Wen, Tianyi Li, Yushuai Li, Christian S. Jensen, Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
Surveys existing methods for learning reusable representations of movement trajectories and brings them together into a single modular framework with shared code, so that new methods can be built, compared, and evaluated on common ground.
IEEE TKDE | 2025
UVTM: Universal Vehicle Trajectory Modeling with ST Feature Domain Generation
Yan Lin, Jilin Hu, Shengnan Guo, Bin Yang, Christian S. Jensen, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
A single model for vehicle GPS trajectories that handles many tasks such as travel time estimation, trajectory recovery, and trajectory prediction, instead of maintaining a separate model for each. It stays accurate even when trajectories are sparse or only part of their features are available, by learning to rebuild dense and complete trajectories from incomplete ones.
IEEE TKDE | 2023
Pre-training General Trajectory Embeddings with Maximum Multi-view Entropy Coding
Yan Lin, Huaiyu Wan, Shengnan Guo, Jilin Hu, Christian S. Jensen, Youfang Lin
Learns general-purpose representations of movement trajectories from unlabeled data that capture both travel behavior and spatial and temporal patterns. The learned representations avoid task-specific bias so they transfer well across many downstream tasks.
AAAI | 2021
Pre-training Context and Time Aware Location Embeddings from Spatial-Temporal Trajectories for User Next Location Prediction
Yan Lin, Huaiyu Wan, Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin
Pre-trains location representations from movement trajectories that capture how the meaning of a place changes with its surrounding context and the time of visit, leading to more accurate prediction of a user's next location.
NeurIPS | 2025
TransferTraj: A Vehicle Trajectory Learning Model for Region and Task Transferability
Tonglong Wei*, Yan Lin*, Zeyu Zhou, Haomin Wen, Jilin Hu, Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin, Gao Cong, Huaiyu Wan
Learns from vehicle GPS trajectories in a way that transfers across different geographic regions and different prediction tasks without retraining, removing the need to keep separate specialized models. Handles each task by treating it as recovering hidden parts of a trajectory, so one model serves many tasks even with limited data.

Spatiotemporal data mining is a broader topic that is inclusive of the above. It covers research on extracting and utilizing patterns from large-scale data with spatial information and that is dynamic over time (usually sourced from transportation scenarios).
IJCAI | 2026
DiSGMM: A Method for Time-varying Microscopic Weight Completion on Road Networks
Yan Lin, Hu Jilin, Shengnan Guo, Christian S. Jensen, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
Fills in missing fine-grained, time-varying traffic conditions on road networks, such as travel speeds on individual road segments during specific time periods, when observations are sparse both across segments and within each segment. Estimates the full range of likely conditions for each segment and time rather than a single value.
SIGMOD | 2024
Origin-Destination Travel Time Oracle for Map-based Services
Yan Lin, Huaiyu Wan, Jilin Hu, Shengnan Guo, Bin Yang, Christian S. Jensen, Youfang Lin
Estimates the travel time between an origin and a destination at a given departure time by learning from many historical trips that connect the same pair of locations. It first infers a likely route between the two points and then predicts the travel time along it, improving accuracy for map-based navigation services.
KDD | 2026
RIPCN: A Road Impedance Principal Component Network for Probabilistic Traffic Flow Forecasting
Haochen Lv*, Yan Lin*, Shengnan Guo, Xiaowei Mao, Hong Nie, Letian Gong, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
Forecasts future traffic flow across a road network while also estimating how uncertain each prediction is, combining transportation theory with learned models to capture how congestion shifts traffic between connected roads over time.
NeurIPS | 2025
PLMTrajRec: A Scalable and Generalizable Trajectory Recovery Method with Pre-trained Language Models
Tonglong Wei*, Yan Lin*, Youfang Lin, Shengnan Guo, Jilin Hu, Haitao Yuan, Gao Cong, Huaiyu Wan
Recovers the missing points in sparse movement trajectories to restore detailed paths, while needing only a small amount of dense training data and generalizing across trajectories recorded at different sampling rates.
WWW | 2025
Path-LLM: A Multi-Modal Path Representation Learning by Aligning and Fusing with Large Language Models
Yongfu Wei*, Yan Lin*, Hongfan Gao, Ronghui Xu, Sean Bin Yang, Jilin Hu
Learns representations of paths in a road network by combining the network structure with text that describes physical and regional context, which earlier methods left out. The combined view improves accuracy on tasks such as ranking paths and estimating travel time, including settings with little or no labeled data.

AI for materials science is a new research direction I am exploring. The promise is that data mining-driven AI enables discovery of new materials with tailored properties, a non-trivial process in traditional materials design.
Advanced Materials | 2026
Inverse Design of Amorphous Materials with Targeted Properties
Jonas A. Finkler*, Yan Lin*, Tao Du, Jilin Hu, Morten M. Smedskjaer
Generates atomic structures of disordered materials such as glasses that match desired target properties, and refines them into stable low-energy configurations. Also introduces new datasets of amorphous materials to support this kind of design.
Oral Presentation | PNCS17
AMDEN: Amorphous Materials DEnoising Network
Yan Lin*, Jonas A. Finkler*, Tao Du, Morten M. Smedskjaer, Jilin Hu
Villum Foundation
Research on Inverse Design of Materials Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models
This project focuses on developing diffusion probabilistic models to first understand the relationship between chemistry/structure and material properties, then enable the inverse design of new materials with specific properties.
AAAI | 2026
SculptDrug: A Spatial Condition-Aware Bayesian Flow Model for Structure-based Drug Design
Qingsong Zhong, Haomin Yu, Yan Lin, Wangmeng Shen, Long Zeng, Jilin Hu
Generates drug molecules that fit a target protein's three-dimensional structure, keeping the molecules shaped to sit within the protein's surface and consistent with both its overall form and fine details. This produces more accurate candidate molecules for structure-based drug discovery.
Teaching
My course teaching follows three core principles: a solid understanding of the subject matter, awareness of students' established experiences and background, and problem-based learning style applied throughout lectures, exercises, and exams. This translates to practices including tailor-made blog-style literature that is both professional and intuitive, inspirational lectures that connect theory to real-world problems, and progressively-arranged hands-on exercises that build practical problem-solving skills.
Aalborg University | 2025 - 2026
AI Systems & Infrastructure
This course introduces students to streamlined interaction with AI models and systems, as well as implementation and deployment of scalable, production-ready AI systems on real-world infrastructures.

I am building my supervision experience, supervising Bachelor's and Master's semester projects. My supervision focuses on problem definition, critical thinking about design choices, and delivering convincing conclusions.
Aalborg University | 2026
Assessment of the Data Foundation for Trajectory Machine Learning
A Master's semester project on bringing a data-centric perspective to trajectory machine learning, assessing the quality of training data and developing filtering and augmentation methods to improve model performance on downstream tasks.
Aalborg University | 2025 - 2026
A Camera That Sees Behind
A Bachelor's semester project on developing a computationally lightweight model deployable on embedded devices to remove humans from images or video feeds, serving as a prototype GDPR-compliant surveillance system.
Service

I actively contribute to the academic community through professional membership and peer review of journal and conference papers.

  • IEEE, ACM member
  • Secretary of IEEE (Denmark Section) Computer Society
  • Reviewer for journals: TKDE, TKDD, TNNLS, TIST, TII, and TVT
  • Member of program committees of conferences: KDD, ICLR, NeurIPS, AAAI, CVPR, ICCV, IJCAI, WWW, and WACV