Hi, I’m SUN Yongkang, a PhD student in the Department of Computing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. My research focuses on data management, with a particular interest in tabular data, and I am fortunate to work under the supervision of Dr. SHi Jieming.

Before joining PolyU, I received my Bachelor of Engineering degree with honors from the School of Computer Science and the Hongyi Honor College at Wuhan University, where I was advised by Prof. GUO Chi.

Since January 2026, I have been a research intern at ByteDance with the Douyin Risk Control Group in Shenzhen, focusing on content safety and vision-language models.

My research interests include:

  • Data Management, particularly Table Understanding.
  • Vision-Language Models, especially for Content Safety.

If you are interested in any form of academic collaboration, please feel free to reach out via email.

📝 Publications

Efficient and Effective Table-Centric Table Union Search in Data Lakes

Yongkang Sun, Zhihao Ding, Huiqiang Wang, Reynold Cheng, Jieming Shi

Under Review, 2026

Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations

Zhihao Ding*, Yongkang Sun*, Jieming Shi

SIGMOD 2026, in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Management of Data, 2026.

📖 Educations

  • 2024.09 - present, Ph.D student in Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  • 2020.09 - 2024.06, B.Eng in Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University. GPA: 3.85/4.0, Average Score: 91.67/100

💻 Experiences

  • 2026.01 - present, Research Intern at ByteDance in the Douyin Risk Control Group

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2024.09 PolyU Research Postgraduate Scholarship, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  • 2024.06 Honor Graduate, Hongyi Honor College, Wuhan University
  • 2020.09 ~ 2024.06 Academic Scholarship (awarded annually), Hongyi Honor College, Wuhan University
  • 2020.09 ~ 2024.06 Model Student Award (awarded annually), Wuhan University
  • 2020.09 First-class Scholarship for First-year Students, Wuhan University

💬 Others

  • Teaching assistant (TA) of INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (2024 fall) and BIG DATA COMPUTING (2025 spring, 2025 fall)