About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Florida State University. Prior to that, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Jundong Li.

[Recruiting PhDs & Interns]: I am actively seeking ambitious students for Ph.D. or research intern roles. Please email me with your CV, transcripts, and brief descriptions of your preferred research topics. Kindly mark the subject with [PhD Application] or [Research Intern Application]. Magic Word: Please add appoggiatura in the email subject to ensure attention and to show that you have read this carefully.

(i) Research Summary: My research interest mainly lies in achieving responsible AI to further advance social good such as facilitating inclusive decision-making. I have abundant research works under related topics with a particular focus on relational data, including 30+ published research papers (13 first-author ones) in the following areas [see full list]:

• Explainability: Model Interpretability; Prediction Justification
• Algorithmic Fairness: Fairness Measurement; Algorithm Debiasing
• AI Security: Attack and Defense
• AI/ML+X (Applications): Healthcare; Criminal Justice; Finance

(ii) Highlighted Honors: I received Louis T. Rader Graduate Research Award, Endowed Fellowship, and Best Poster @Doctoral Forum of SDM 2022. I am truly grateful for the generous efforts from the associated institutions and organizers.

(iii) Highlighted Project: I initiated and have been managing the open-source tool PyGDebias — a Python library featured for 20+ built-in datasets and 10+ implementations of popular fairness-aware graph learning algorithms.

News

• Oct. 2024: One papers accepted by TMLR.
• Oct. 2024: One papers accepted by BigData.
• Oct. 2024: Two papers accepted by NeurIPS.
• Sept. 2024: Received The College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Faculty Award. I appreciate the generous support from the Dean’s office.
• Sept. 2024: One papers accepted by EMNLP.
• Aug. 2024: We are preparing for seminar series Student Seminars @FSU. Contact us to present!
• Aug. 2024: New position started in the Department of Computer Science at Florida State University.
• Jun. 2024: Dissertation defense passed.
• May 2024: Two papers accepted by SIGKDD.
• May 2024: One paper accepted by ACL.
• May 2024: One paper accepted by ICML.
• Mar. 2024: One paper accepted by TheWebConf.
• Jan. 2024: One paper accepted by PAKDD.
• Jan. 2024: One paper accepted by ICLR.
• Nov. 2023: One paper accepted by TKDD. …

Industry Experiences

• June 2023 – Sept. 2023, Research Intern, Snap. Mentor: Tong Zhao, Yozen Liu, and Neil Shah.
• June 2022 – Sept. 2022, Research Intern, Microsoft Research. Mentor: Tobias Schnabel.

Mentored Students (Partial List)

• Pranav Bangarbale (Undergrad in CS @UVa)
• Alex Jing Huang (Undergrad in CS @UVa)
• Srimanth Tangedipalli (Undergrad in CS @UVa)
• Mike Song (Quantitative researcher @J.P. Morgan)
• Eric, Xuanjia Bi (Undergrad in EE & CPE @UVa)
• Deepaloke Chattopadhyay (M.S. @UVa, now Data Scientist @2nd Order Solutions)
• Zheng Huang (M.S. @UVa, now Software Development Engineer @Amazon)
• Yiling Yuan (Undergrad in CS @BUPT, now grad student @CMU)

Services

• Invited Program Committee Member: AAAI 2024, CIKM 2023, ECMLPKDD 2023, KDD 2023, SDM 2023, CIKM 2022, SIGKDD 2022, AAAI 2022, WSDM 2022, etc.
• Invited Reviewer & External Reviewer: SIGKDD, SIGIR, AAAI, ICML, WWW, ICLR, NeurIPS, TKDE, TKDD, CIKM, WSDM, ECML-PKDD, PAKDD, BigData, etc.
• Volunteer: SIGKDD 2021, IJCAI 2021, SIGKDD 2020, etc.

Invited Talks (Selected)

• Feb. 2024, “Artificial Intelligence: What Do We Have and Where We Are Heading?” at the University of Virginia. Host: Prof. Xu Yi.
• Feb. 2023, “Unlocking Ethical Graph Neural Networks” at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Host: Prof. Yifeng Gao.
• Sept. 2022, “Fairness in Graph Mining: Metrics and Algorithms” at Mila - Quebec AI Institute [Slides].