About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Florida State University, where I serve as the founder and director of RAI (Responsible AI) Lab. 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

• Dec. 2024: We released Political-LLM, a comprehensive guidebook outlining the recent advances in the interdisciplinary area of political science and LLMs. Check our paper and online resources!
• Dec. 2024: Two papers accepted by AAAI.
• Nov. 2024: Received The Collaborative Grant between Computer Science and Psychology. I appreciate the generous support from the Department of Computer Science and Department of Psychology at FSU.
• 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: Dr. Tong Zhao, Yozen Liu, and Dr. Neil Shah.
• June 2022 – Sept. 2022, Research Intern, Microsoft Research. Mentor: Dr. Tobias Schnabel.

Services

• Invited Program Committee Member: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, AAAI, KDD, CIKM, ECMLPKDD, SDM, etc.
• Invited Reviewer & External Reviewer: SIGKDD, SIGIR, AAAI, ICML, WWW, ICLR, ICML, 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].