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
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
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
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
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
NeurIPS | 2025
TrajMamba: An Efficient and Semantic-rich Vehicle Trajectory Pre-training Model
Yichen Liu*, Yan Lin*, Shengnan Guo, Zeyu Zhou, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan

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).
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
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
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
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
AAAI | 2025
DutyTTE: Deciphering Uncertainty in Origin-Destination Travel Time Estimation
Xiaowei Mao*, Yan Lin*, Shengnan Guo, Yubin Chen, Xingyu Xian, Haomin Wen, Qisen Xu, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
NeurIPS | 2024
Mobility-LLM: Learning Visiting Intentions and Travel Preference from Human Mobility Data with Large Language Models
Letian Gong*, Yan Lin*, Xinyue Zhang, Yiwen Lu, Xuedi Han, Yichen Liu, Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan

Interdisciplinary research between data mining and materials science is a new research direction I am exploring. The promise is that data mining enables discovery of new materials with tailored properties, a non-trivial process in traditional materials design.
Workshop | NeurIPS 2025
AMDEN: Amorphous Materials DEnoising Network
Oral Presentation | PNCS17
AMDEN: Amorphous Materials DEnoising Network
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
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.
Fall 2025 | Aalborg University
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, currently supervising Bachelor's-level semester projects. My supervision focuses on problem definition, critical thinking about design choices, and delivering convincing conclusions.
Fall 2025 - Spring 2026 | Aalborg University
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