Particularly, during the past six years, Mr. Zhao has been focusing on the research of recommender systems, developing innovative recommendation technologies by leveraging user-generated content. His work has appeared in top conferences/journal, like IUI/RecSys/SDM/KDD/TIST. His work in IUI 2008 is one of the first attempts to improve recommendation by incorporating tagging data. Other innovative works include developing a new type of recommender system based on social map with social content data, inferring user preference from social relation data, modeling changing user preference with contextual data, etc. He also filed more than 20 patents.

His ongoing projects are to solve real industry problems, including banking and retail industries, by using recommendation technologies.