Yan Yang received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1984 and 1987 respectively. She received her PhD degree in Traffic Information Engineering and Control in 2007 from Southwest Jiaotong University. In 2002/2003 and 2004/2005 she worked as a visiting scholar at the Center of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (CPAMI) in Waterloo University, Canada. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA in 2018. She is currently Professor, Deputy Dean of School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence and holds an Academic and Technical Leader of Sichuan Province.

Prof. Yang has participated in more than 10 high-level projects recently. And has taken charge of three programs supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), one Project of National Science and Technology Support Program, etc. She has authored and co-authored over 230 papers (e.g., IEEE Transaction on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing) in journals and international conferences (e.g., IJCAI, ICDM, EMNLP). 1 special issue of international journal, 1 proceeding, and obtaining several authorized Chinese invention patents. She has served as conference chair, program chair, or organizing chair of many international conferences, and serves as an associate editor of International Journal of Big Data Mining and Analytics. She was a meeting review expert of the National Natural Science Award, Science and Technology Progress Award and Technology Invention Award. She won the special award of Zhan Tianyou Railway Science and Technology Award, and first prize of computer science and technology of Sichuan Province.

Prof. Yang has successively lectured undergraduate or postgraduate courses such as data structure, operating system, analysis and design of operating system, introduction to the forefront of computer science, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and advanced artificial intelligence. She is responsible for national first-class undergraduate major "computer science and technology", Sichuan Excellent Courses "operating system", and Sichuan Provincial Curriculum Ideological and Political Demonstration Course. She has presided over more than 10 provincial and university-level educational reform projects, published more than 20 educational reform papers, and edited 2 textbooks. She served as an engineering education professional certification expert of the Ministry of Education and a member of the Sichuan Computer Professional Teaching Steering Committee. She presided and won the second prize of Sichuan Higher Education Teaching Achievements and the first prize of university-level teaching achievements.

Prof. Yang is a distinguished member of CCF, a senior member of CAAI, a member of IEEE, ACM, CCF Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition, CCF Theoretical Computer Science, CCF Task Force on Big Data, CAAI Machine Learning, CAAI Grain Calculation and Knowledge Discovery Committee, Vice Chair of ACM Chengdu Chapter, Director of ACM SIGCSE China Chapter, Vice president of Sichuan Computer Society, and Director of Sichuan Artificial Intelligence Society.