Chuxu Zhang photo

Chuxu Zhang / 张初旭

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Director, MINDS Lab
School of Computing, College of Engineering
University of Connecticut (UConn)
352 Mansfield Rd, Storrs, CT 06269, USA
chuxu.zhang@uconn.edu


News/ Announcement
Pin: Looking for multiple PhD students (Spring/Fall 2025) and research interns at UConn SoC. Please read THIS for detailed student recruitment information.
Service: Associate Editor for DMKD (Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery) and AI Open.
Aug 2024: Resource-efficient learning workshop at KDD'24 on Aug 25.
Aug 2024: NSF grant on promoting community resilience for teenagers and young adults.       
Service: Area Chair for ICLR'25, NeurIPS'24, KDD'24, etc.
:)
Invited Talk: Graph Machine Learning: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Safety
Feb 2024: The NSF CAREER Award. Thanks to NSF, my excellent mentors, students, and collaborators :)
Aug 2023: Resource-efficient Learning workshop at KDD'23: [Call For Paper], [Paper Submission Site]
Jul 2023: NSF grant on dietary recommendations       
Invited Talk: Towards Societal Impact of AI [slide]   
May 2023: AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention by AMiner
Service: Area Chair/Senior PC for AAAI'23, WSDM'23, SDM'23, KDD'23, IJCAI'23, CIKM'23, etc.
Jan 2023: New Faculty Highlight at AAAI'23    
Invited Talk: Resource-efficient Graph Representation Learning
   
Aug 2022: NSF grant on drug trafficking network detection and intervention
Aug 2022: KDD'22 Tutorial: Towards Graph Minimally-supervised Learning
Invited Talk: Few-shot Learning on Graphs
   
Service: Area Chair/Senior PC for KDD'22, AAAI'22, CIKM'22, etc.
Nov 2021: The Best Paper Award at CIKM'21    

About
I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Connecticut. My research interests center around machine learning and data science. Recently, I have focused on developing foundational, resource-efficient, and safe machine learning algorithms and models, particularly on graph and language data. Besides, I apply them to applications in various domains including healthcare, social media, science, and others. My works are majorly published in top conferences of machine learning (e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR) and data science (e.g., KDD). I direct the Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MINDS) Lab.

I have received some awards and honors such as the NSF CAREER Award (2024), the Frontiers of Science Award (2024), the AAAI New Faculty Highlight (2023), etc. Besides, my work won several Best Paper (Candidate) Awards in major conferences including CIKM 2021, WWW 2019, WAIM 2016, etc.

Before joining UConn, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University. I received my PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Notre Dame in 2020, advised by Professor Nitesh Chawla.

My wife and I live in the Greater New York area.


Recent Publications
Here are selected recent publications. Please see my Google Scholar page for a complete list.

  • NeurIPS'24: GFT: Graph Foundation Model with Transferable Tree Vocabulary
  • ICML'24: From Coarse to Fine: Enable Comprehensive Graph Self-supervised Learning with Multi-granular Semantic Ensemble
  • ICLR'24: Mitigating Severe Robustness Degradation on Graphs
  • KDD'24: Diet-ODIN: A Novel Framework for Opioid Misuse Detection with LLM-based Interpretable Dietary Patterns
  • KDD'24: Graph Cross Supervised Learning via Generalized Knowledge
  • ICML'23: When Sparsity Meets Contrastive Models: Less Graph Data Can Bring Better Class-Balanced Representations
  • ICLR'23: Chasing All-Round Graph Representation Robustness: Model, Training, and Optimization
  • ICLR'23: Multi-task Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks Enable Stronger Task Generalization
  • ICLR'23: Learning MLPs on Graphs: A Unified View of Effectiveness, Robustness, and Efficiency
  • NeurIPS'22: Label-invariant Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Graph Classification
  • NeurIPS'22: Co-Modality Imbalanced Graph Contrastive Learning
  • KDD'22: Disentangled Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Opioid Overdose Prediction
  • KDD'22: Task-Adaptive Few-shot Node Classification