Yinlin Chen, Ph.D.

_{Associate Director & Associate Professor
Center for Digital Research & Scholarship}

   

<sub>Biography: Dr. Yinlin Chen earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Application from Virginia Tech. His research interests include Digital Libraries, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Cloud Computing, Natural Language Processing, and Information Retrieval. Passionate about cloud-based applications using AWS and GCP, Dr. Chen has taught Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Database Management Systems courses. He has served on program committees and reviewers for conferences such as CIKM, SIGIR, JCDL, iPRES, ICADL, TPDL, and DLF Forum. Additionally, he has been a Fedora Repository committer.

2026 - present - Associate Director, Center for Digital Research & Scholarship, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
2025 - present - Associate Professor, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
2023 - present - Affiliate Faculty, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
2022 - 2026 - Assistant Director, Center for Digital Research & Scholarship, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
2020 - 2025 - Assistant Professor, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
2020 - 2024 - Instructor, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
2019 - 2022 - Digital Library Architect, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
2014 - 2019 - Software Engineer, University Libraries, Virginia Tech

I am seeking self-motivated undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. students to join me in collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects. Our areas of focus include AI, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and large language models. If you are currently enrolled at Virginia Tech and interested in working with me, please feel free to contact me.</sub>

News

LIBRAI Online Workshop Now Available (October, 2026): All 6 modules are complete, with video lectures, slides, exercises, and resources, so librarians can learn at their own pace. Participants who build and submit a capstone showcase can earn the LIBRAI Digital Badge in generative AI for libraries. Register anytime on the Training page to get started. Our paper "HouseTS: A Large-Scale, Multimodal Spatiotemporal U.S. Housing Dataset" has been accepted at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, December 14–17, 2026 Paper presentation "Learning Subject Tags from Incomplete Labels: A Recall-Oriented VLM Pipeline for Historical Photographs" at ACM/IEEE JCDL 2026, Dallas, Texas, USA, October 13–16, 2026 (DOI) Our paper "METT: High-Frequency Return Forecasting from Event Streams" has been accepted and selected for an oral presentation at the 7th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF 2026), Milan, Italy, November 14–17, 2026 Our paper “Evaluation of Open-Source LLMs for Automated Subject Metadata Generation in Scholarly Workflows” was published in Journal of Library Metadata, October 1, 2026 Our paper "GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models" has been accepted as a poster presentation at the RoBoWoMo Workshop at IROS 2026, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, September 27, 2026 Awarded: IMLS National Leadership Grants - Libraries (LG-259770-OLS-26) Sovereign Library Intelligence (SLI): An Agentic AI Framework for Trustworthy Library Collections Stewardship and Access, August, 2026 (PI) Our paper "Learning Subject Tags from Incomplete Labels: A Recall-Oriented VLM Pipeline for Historical Photographs" was accepted by JCDL 2026 (DOI) Our paper “Evaluation of Open-Source LLMs for Automated Subject Metadata Generation in Scholarly Workflows” was accepted by Journal of Library Metadata, 2026 Presentation "Designing GenAI Curriculum for Library AI Practitioners" at Teaching and Learning with AI Conference, Orlando, FL, June 11-13, 2026 Presentation "Prompt Library at Virginia Tech" at SCONUL AI Webinar - Prompt libraries, Virtual, May 15, 2026 Earned CyberAmbassador Certificate (Communication, Teamwork, Leadership), CyberAmbassadors Program (NSF Award #1730137), April 20, 2026 Presentation at ISBI 2026, London, UK, April 8–11, 2026 I am serving on the Program Committee for CIKM 2026, Rome, Italy, November 7-11, 2026 I am pleased to serve as a Proceedings Chair and Senior Program Committee member for ACM/IEEE JCDL 2026, Dallas, Texas, USA, October 13–16, 2026 Our paper “SemiETPicker: Fast and Label-Efficient Particle Picking for CryoET Tomography Using Semi-Supervised Learning” has been accepted at ISBI 2026 as an oral presentation, London, UK, April 8–11, 2026 Presented at the workshop "Unlocking the Power of AI in Research," Virginia Tech, February 27, 2026 Presentation "Learning Prompt Engineering Through Curated Example" at eLearning in Libraries Symposium 2025, Virtual, November 25-26, 2025 Google Gemini Certified Educator, October, 2025 Intro to Prompt Engineering online course, Virginia Tech Continuing & Professional Education, September 1 - October 12, 2025 Presentation "AI fluency, Prompt Engineering, and Prompt Science" at Business Information Technology departmental retreat, August 21, 2025 Earned four Oracle Cloud certifications: Data Science Professional, AI Vector Search Professional, Generative AI Professional, and AI Foundations Associate (July-August 2025) Presentation "Developing Generative AI Competencies for Librarians" at Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) Virtual Conference, June 9-12, 2025 Intro to Prompt Engineering online course, Virginia Tech Continuing & Professional Education, June 2 - July 14, 2025 Presentation at CNI Spring 2025 Membership Meeting, Milwaukee, WI, April 7-8, 2025 Workshop at ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2024), Hong Kong, China, December 16-20, 2024 Presentation at IEEE BigData 2024, Washington, DC, December 15-18, 2024 Congratulations to Pradyumna Upendra Dasu for successfully defending his MS thesis, "Topic Modeling for Heterogeneous Digital Libraries: Tailored Approaches Using Large Language Models," at Virginia Tech on December 13, 2024 Presentation at 27th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2024), Livingstone, Zambia, November 4-6, 2024 Presentation at Access 2024, Montréal, Québec, October 21-23, 2024 Presentation at 24 Hours of Global IT event, August 28, 2024 Awarded: IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (RE-256655-OLS-24) LIBRAI: Liberating Libraries through Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program, August, 2024 (PI) previous...