Yu started his career in private enterprise, at
IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he eventually became manager of the Software Tools and Techniques group. Currently he is Distinguished Professor and Wexler Chair in Information Technology at the Department of Computer Science of the
University of Illinois at Chicago Yu holds over 300 U.S. patents, is an
ACM and
IEEE Fellow, is
editor-in-chief of
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, has chaired numerous conferences, and received several awards, including from
IBM, the
IEEE and, in 2022, he and his coauthors, Yizhou Sun, Jiawei Han, Xifeng Yan, and Tianyi Wu, received the Very Large Data Bases Endowment Inc. (VLDB) 2022 Test of Time award, for their 2011 research paper,
PathSim: Meta Path-Based Top-K Similarity Search in Heterogeneous Information Networks. His research interests are in the fields of "data mining (especially on graph/network mining), social network, privacy preserving data publishing, data stream, database systems, and Internet applications and technologies." Yu is an
ISI Highly Cited researcher. According to
Google Scholar, Yu's
H-index is among the ten highest in computer science. == Selected works ==