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. I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Jundong Li.

[Recruiting PhDs & Interns, 4-5 available PhD positions for 2026 & 2027]: 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.

Research Summary: My research interest mainly lies in achieving responsible AI that directly contributes to critical AI infrastructures and enhances collaborative innovations for the industry, with a particular focus on Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). I have abundant research works under related topics with a particular focus on relational data, including 70+ published research papers in the following areas [see full list]:

• AI Security & Privacy: Model Extraction Attack and Defense; Privacy Certification
• AI Robustness: Generalization; Invariant Learning
• AI Explainability: Mechanistic Interpretability; Graph-Based Explaination
• AI/ML+X (Applications): Healthcare; Disaster Resilience; Social Science

News

• April 2026: Truly honored to receive the only Faculty Research Award at FSU Computer Science Department over the past two years. Such credit also goes to my talented students and interns, and my inspiring colleagues and collaborators — cannot achieve this without any of you!!
• April 2026: Congrats to my student Lincan Li for winning the FSU CS 2026 Graduate Leadership Award!
• April 2026: Congrats to my student Xueqi Cheng for winning the FSU 2026 OLLI Scholarship recipient (one of the four)!
• April 2026: One papers accepted by ACL 2026.
• March 2026: One papers accepted by IEEE ICHI 2026.
• March 2026: Two papers accepted by IJCNN 2026 at IEEE WCCI 2026.
• March 2026: We are open-sourcing one of our recent work, LangSkills, with 101K+ structured skills distilled from 62K+ research papers and 23K+ tech sources, packaged for fast offline search. Check our webpage here and our GitHub here!

• March 2026: One paper accepted by ICLR 2026 Workshop on Principled Design for Trustworthy AI - Interpretability, Robustness, and Safety across Modalities.
• Feb. 2026: We are open-sourcing our interactive AI demo site How AI Works under Encyclopedia World! See our GitHub repo here!

• Feb. 2026: We are open-sourcing our geospatial visualization site GeoLive under Encyclopedia World! See our GitHub repo here!
• Jan. 2026: One paper accepted by ICLR 2026.
• Jan. 2026: One paper accepted by TKDE 2026.
• Nov. 2025: One paper accepted by SIGKDD 2026.
• Nov. 2025: Received the Second Prize Award in BlueSky Track of ICDM, 2025
• Nov. 2025: Two papers accepted by AAAI 2026.
• Nov. 2025: Received the Best Short Paper Award at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025.
• Oct. 2025: One paper accepted by AACL 2025.
• Oct. 2025: One paper accepted by WSDM 2026.
• Oct. 2025: One paper accepted by IEEE BigData.
• Oct. 2025: Featured interview by WCTV (CBS News)!
  
• Oct. 2025: Invited talk at National Science Foundation PATh CICI Presentation Series.
• Oct. 2025: Awarded the FSU Honors in the Major Mentor Materials Grant.
• Oct. 2025: Awarded Featured AI Researcher by Campus Partners at Florida State University.
• Sept. 2025: One paper accepted by ICDM 2025 Bluesky Track.
• Sept. 2025: One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
• Sept. 2025: Our lab was featured in FSU news! Check it out here.
• Aug. 2025: We published a brand new library focusing on the model extraction attack & defense for graph machine learning! Check our Github Repo and our Official Website!

Invited Talks (Selected)

• 04/2026 (Expected), FSU CS Board of Advisors (BOA) Meeting: A Guide to Write Good Research Grant Proposals
• 04/2026, FSU Department of Psychology: Towards Foundation Models for Epilepsy — Diagnosis, Prediction, Medication, and Atomatic Scientific Discovery
• 02/2026, FSU-FAMU College of Engineering: Graph-Based Machine Learning as a Service
• 11/2025, Invited panelist at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025
• 10/2025, University of Delaware: Unleashing the Power of Graph-Based Machine Learning as a Service
• 10/2025, National Science Foundation PATh CICI Presentation Series: Toward Secure Machine Learning as a Service for Collaborative Scientific Research
• 08/2025, Harvard University: Secure Machine Learning as a Service & Interdisciplinary Applications in Healthcare
• 07/2025, Florida State University: Navigating Secure Machine Learning as a Service
• 06/2025, Harvard University: Model Extraction Attacks on Large Language Models
• 04/2025, Rice University: Political-LLM
• 03/2025, UIIC Summit @DistribuTech: AI in Utility Operations
• 02/2025, Harvard University: Model Extraction Attacks Against Graph Learning Models
• 10/2024, INFORMS: Responsible Graph Machine Learning
• 10/2024, Case Western University: Unleashing the Power of Algorithmic Fairness