Prof. Yan is a Fellow of the Singapore Academy of Engineering, AAAI, ACM, IEEE, and IAPR. His research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia analysis. To date, he has published over 800 papers in top-tier international journals and conferences, achieving an H-index exceeding 140. He has also been recognized as one of the World's Highly Cited Researchers for ten years.

Under Prof. Yan's leadership, his team has secured ten first-place or honorable-mention accolades in two flagship competitions, Pascal VOC and ImageNet (ILSVRC). Additionally, his team has earned more than ten best paper and best student paper awards, including a remarkable grand slam at ACM Multimedia, a premier conference in multimedia research, with three Best Paper Awards, two Best Student Paper Awards, and one Best Demo Award.