Dr. Eric Torng interviews Dr. Jiliang Tang who has just been awarded the ACM SIGKDD Rising Star Award. Quoting SIGKDD's announcement, "The award aims to celebrate the early accomplishments of the SIGKDD community's brightest new minds... Tang's notable work includes research into representation learning, especially on graphs and its applications on the internet and social media domains."  Besides discussing this award, Eric and Jiliang talk about representation learning, a new book on deep learning and graphs Jiliang and his lab have just released, plus Jiliang offers advice for anyone deciding between industry and academia.