Ningren (Peter) Han
EECS PhD @ MIT
About Me
Hi, I'm Peter. I'm currently a Senior Staff Software Engineering Manager at Google, working on YouTube Shorts Recommendations. I earned my PhD in EECS from MIT, where I focused on applying computational and statistical methods to problems in optical spectroscopy.
My team at Shorts is one of the core recommendation teams at YouTube, with more than 30 full-time machine learning engineers. We work on recommendation systems, applied machine learning, and applications of LLMs that deliver real impact to users and creators. We are responsible for building the recommendation systems that power YouTube Shorts, one of the fastest-growing products in the world. Our work has been recognized at top conferences such as RecSys, WWW, KDD, and ACL. Earlier in my career, I also contributed to research published in leading scientific journals, including Nature Photonics and Nature Communications.
Selected Recent Publications
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User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems.
Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05522, 2025.
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Reducing Symbiosis Bias through Better A/B Tests of Recommendation Algorithms.
Jennifer Brennan, Yahu Cong, Yiwei Yu, Lina Lin, Yajun Peng, Changping Meng, Ningren Han, Jean Pouget-Abadie, David M. Holtz.
Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025 (WWW '25), Sydney, Australia, 2025, pp. 3702–3715.
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Country-diverted Experiments for Mitigation of Network Effects.
Lina Lin, Changping Meng, Jennifer Brennan, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Ningren Han, Shuchao Bi, Yajun Peng.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '24), Bari, Italy, 2024, pp. 765–767.
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LLMs for User Interest Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems.
Jianling Wang, Haokai Lu, Yifan Liu, He Ma, Yueqi Wang, Yang Gu, Shuzhou Zhang, Ningren Han, Shuchao Bi, Lexi Baugher, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '24), Bari, Italy, 2024, pp. 872–877.
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For a complete list of publications and patents, including academic and pre-industry work, please see my Google Scholar profile.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2011 – 2018
TA for Graduate Machine Learning and Deep Learning Courses (one of the top-rated TAs).
Awarded Siebel Scholar (1 out of 5 in the department).
National University of Singapore 2007 – 2011
Received a number of top university awards including the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal, Institute of Engineers Singapore Gold Medal, Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize, Dean's Lists, Full Undergraduate Scholarship and more.
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