Haixun Wang

VP Engineering, Head of AI @ EvenUp

I lead the AI and Data team at EvenUp, where we use generative AI and agentic systems to reinvent legal tech. Before EvenUp, I led the Algorithms team at Instacart, applying machine learning to e-commerce and fulfillment. Earlier, I led the Research & Applied Science organization at WeWork, with work spanning NLP, computer vision, robotics, data management, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. Across these roles, I’ve focused on machine learning and text understanding, including large-scale NLP pipelines for short text and documents and data-driven semantic networks.

Experience

• VP Engineering, Head of AI, EvenUp (2024 – present)
• Affiliate Full Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Washington (2022 – present)
• Board of Trustees, VLDB Endowment (2022 – present)
• Distinguished Fellow, Fellows Fund (2021 – present)
• Editor in Chief, IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (2018 – present)
• VP Engineering, Algorithms & Distinguished Scientist, Instacart (2020 – 2024)
• VP Engineering & Distinguished Scientist, WeWork (2018 – 2020)
• Director of Natural Language Processing, Amazon (2017 – 2018)
• Engineering Manager and Research Scientist, Facebook (2015 – 2017)
• Staff Research Scientist, Google Research (2013 – 2015)
• Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research (2009 – 2013)
• Technical Assistant to Head of Research, IBM Research (2007 – 2009)
• Research Staff Member, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (2000 – 2006)

Honors

• ACM Fellow, 2025, for contributions to graph-based systems and their application to text understanding
• ICDE 10 Year Influential Paper Award, How to Partition a Billion-Node Graph, in ICDE 2014 (awarded 2024)
• IEEE Fellow, 2017, for contributions to knowledge bases for text understanding
• Best Paper Award, Short Text Understanding Through Lexical-Semantic Analysis, in the 31st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2015
• ICDM 10 Year Highest Impact Paper Award, Moment: Maintaining closed frequent itemsets over a stream sliding window, in ICDM 2004 (awarded 2013)
• Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award, Inverse Time Dependency in Convex Regularized Learning, in the 9th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2009
• Best Paper Award, Modeling and Querying E-Commerce Data in Hybrid Relational-XML DBMSs, in the 27th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER), 2008
• IBM High-Value Application Award, 2008 (given to top patents filed that year)

Blogs

• What’s Inside Jev
• One Billion Lobsters and a File Called SOUL.md
• Supercharging ML/AI Foundations at Instacart
• The Data Science Behind the Man Who Solved the Market
• The Homogenization of Language: How AI Could Flatten Our Words and Thoughts
• The coming disruption to e-commerce search
• An Annotated Reading List of Conversational AI
• Getting NLP Ready for Business
• 父亲节

Other links

• LinkedIn, Google Scholar, DBLP
• Projects I initiated and led at Microsoft Research
  • Probase (a data driven semantic network for text understanding)
  • Trinity (a distributed graph engine on a memory cloud)