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Tong He

Co-author of the XGBoost R package; committer on DGL, GluonCV and Apache MXNet; former AWS applied scientist

Tong He is a committer on the open-source projects Deep Graph Library (DGL), GluonCV, Apache MXNet and XGBoost, and created or maintained several R packages on CRAN, including xgboost; the XGBoost R package's DESCRIPTION file lists Tong He as an author alongside Tianqi Chen. From 2018, Tong He worked as a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services, with research interests in computer vision and machine learning. Tong He's homepage notes joining a quantitative fund in September 2025.123

At a glance

Current role
None confirmed in the sources
Sector
Company
Work listed
2
Honors
2
Sources cited
8
Profile reviewed

Career

Tong He earned a master's degree in computing science at Simon Fraser University in 2016 under the supervision of Martin Ester. After working as an embedded software developer at Fortinet from 2016 to 2017, Tong He joined Amazon Web Services in February 2018 as a Senior Applied Scientist working on computer vision and machine learning.1

In September 2025 Tong He's homepage noted a move to a quantitative fund.1

Open-source work

Tong He is listed as an author of the xgboost R package alongside Tianqi Chen and others, and also created or maintained the SwarmSVM, rLTP and pullword packages on CRAN. Tong He is a committer on XGBoost, Apache MXNet, GluonCV and the Deep Graph Library, and co-authored the 2019 paper describing the GluonCV and GluonNLP toolkits.1243

Research

With Tianqi Chen, Tong He wrote "Higgs boson discovery with boosted trees" for the 2014 NIPS workshop on high-energy physics and machine learning. At AWS, Tong He was first author of Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks (2018), which collected training refinements for image classifiers, and later co-authored papers on preference optimization and sparse autoencoders accepted at ICML 2025.561

Work and contributions

  • XGBoost R package Open-source code

    Listed with the "aut" (author) role in the R package's DESCRIPTION file, and named on Tong He's homepage as a creator or maintainer of the xgboost package on CRAN and a committer on XGBoost.217

  • Deep Graph Library, GluonCV and Apache MXNet Open-source code

    Committer on Deep Graph Library (DGL), GluonCV and Apache MXNet, per Tong He's homepage; the GitHub profile pins dmlc/dgl, dmlc/xgboost, apache/mxnet and dmlc/gluon-cv.138

Timeline

  1. Received CERN's Special High Energy Physics meets Machine Learning Award.1
  2. Received the ASA John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award and completed an MS at Simon Fraser University.1
  3. Joined Amazon Web Services as a Senior Applied Scientist.1
  4. Released Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks as first author.6
  5. Co-authored the GluonCV and GluonNLP toolkit paper.4
  6. Joined a quantitative fund.1

Documented roles

The sources do not confirm a current role; these are the roles they document.

Honors and recognition

  • John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award · American Statistical Association, 20161
  • Special High Energy Physics meets Machine Learning Award · CERN, 20141

Companies in their history

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References

8 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Tong He — About MeTong He · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. dmlc/xgboost R-package DESCRIPTION (authors)dmlc (GitHub repository) · Repository · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. hetong007 (Tong He) on GitHubGitHub · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. GluonCV and GluonNLP: Deep Learning in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (arXiv 1907.04433)arXiv · Paper · published Jul 9, 2019 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. Tong He — PublicationsTong He · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks (arXiv 1812.01187)arXiv · Paper · published Dec 4, 2018 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  7. dmlc/xgboost LICENSE (Apache License 2.0)dmlc (GitHub repository) · License · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  8. dmlc/dgl LICENSE (Apache License 2.0)dmlc (GitHub repository) · License · accessed Oct 21, 2026