Yu received his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University, and his Mississippi and Doctor of Philosophy also in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1978, and received his Master of Business Administration from New York University in 1982.
Yu started his career at Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he eventually became manager of the Software Tools and Techniques group. Currently he is Distinguished Professor and Wexler Chair in Information Technology at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Chicago
Yu holds over 300 United States patents, is Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, is Editor-in-Chief of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, chaired numerous conferences, and is awarded several awards by International Business Machines Corporation, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and others Yu"s research interests are in the fields of "data mining (especially on graph/network mining), social network, privacy preserving data publishing, data stream, database systems, and Internet applications and technologies." Yu is an Inter-Services Intelligence Highly Cited researcher
According to Google Scholar he is among the ten highest ranked living American computer scientists.
