Zhong Chen

Awards and Honors:

• Excellence Reviewer Award of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'23), August 2023.
• Outstanding Reviewer Award (a recognition for the top 10% of reviewers) of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'25, 2024 August Cycle), December 2024.
• Outstanding Reviewer Award (a recognition for the top 10% of reviewers) of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'25, 2025 February Cycle), June 2025.
• IJCAI'2025 Travel Grant Award ($900, August 16-22, 2025) in Montreal, Canada.
• The Illinois Innovation Network (IIN) Sustaining Illinois Seed Grant Award (2025). Investigating Mosquito Gut Microbiomes as Reservoirs and Facilitators of Antibiotic Resistance: AI and Experimental Approaches, 05/2025--05/2026 $40,000.
• The American Hearing Research Foundation AHRF's Richard Muench Chairman Grant Award (2025). Novel nanoscale single-molecule microscopy and optogenetic approaches reveal regulatory mechanisms of MYO7A-mediated active cargo transport in live hair cell stereocilia, 01/2026--12/2026, $65,000. Ph.D., Computer Science, Wuhan University of Technology, 2015

Current Research Interests:

Data-centric AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Applications, (Interpretable and Trustworthy) Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data Mining, Online Optimization, Outlier/Anomaly/Novelty Detection, Multi-omics Data Integration, Multi-modal Learning, Interpretable Time Series Forecasting, and AI-related Applications.

Director: Learning, Optimization, and Analysis from Data Lab (LOAD Lab)

Professional Service:

NSF Panel Service

I have served as a panelist at two NSF panels.

Journal Reviewer

I have been invited to serve as the reviewer of international journals including Cancer Research and Treatment (TCRT), Complexity, Information Sciences (INS), Neurocomputing, Cognitive Computation, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, Frontiers in Endocrinology, Frontiers in Oncology, Medical Physics, Physics in Medicine and Biology, Computers and Electrical Engineering (CEE), IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking (TGCN), IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT), IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT), Computers and Electrical Engineering, International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (JMLC), Artificial Intelligence In Medicine (AIIM), Machine Learning with Applications (MLWA), Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA), Neural Networks, The Journal of Supercomputing, Information Processing and Management (IPM), ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Electronics, Journal of Industrial Information Integration (JIII), Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), Journal of Advanced Transportation, Computer Applications in Engineering Education (CAEE), Mathematics, and Briefings in Bioinformatics.

Conference Reviewer and Program Committee Service

Reviewer and PC member of international conferences such as ICDM'16, SDM'17, ICDM'17, ICDM'18, AAAI'19, CIKM'19, ICDM'19, AAAI'20, ICDM'20, AAAI'21, ICDM'21, AAAI'22, IJCAI'22, ICDM'22, BIBM'22, AAAI'23, PAKDD'23, IJCAI'23, KDD'23, FAccT'23 (PC), SMC'23, AAAI'24 (PC), SDM'24, PAKDD'24, IJCAI'24 (PC), KDD'24, ECML-PKDD'24 (PC), ICPR'24, ECAI'24 (PC), AAAI'25 (PC), ICDM'24 (PC), AAAI-AISI'25 (PC), KDD'25 (PC), ICLR'25, PAKDD'25 (PC), SDM'25, IJCAI'25 (PC), ICME'25, ECML-PKDD'25 (PC), ACML'25, AVSS'25 (Meta-Reviewer/Area Chair), ICDM'25 (PC), CIKM'25 (PC), ECAI'25 (PC), ACM-BCB'25, KDD'26, AAAI-AISI'26 (PC), AAAI'26 (PC), PAKDD'26 (PC), AISTATS'26, ICLR'26, ICASSP'26, WWW'26 (PC), IEEE PES'26, ICPR'26, KSEM'26 (PC), ICME'26, CVPR'26, and IJCAI'26 (PC).

Selected publications:

Summary: 72 Papers (27 first-author and 45 co-author/corresponding author).

Conference Papers: NeurIPS(1), NeurIPS-Workshop(5), AAAI(5), IJCAI(1), ICDM(2), SDM(3), ECML-PKDD(3), IEEE BigData(5), CIKM(1), DSAA(1), and ACM-BCB(1).

Journal Papers: Pattern Recognition Letters (PRL), Image and Vision Computing (IVC), International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (JMLC), Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB), Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience (CIN), Mathematical Problems in Engineering (MPIE), Mathematics, Frontiers in Oncology (FIO), Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB), Neurocomputing, The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging (JNHA), BioData Mining, Bioinformatics, Medical Physics, European Journal of Medical Physics (Physica Medica), IEEE Access, Environmental Modelling & Software (ENSO), IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (T-IV), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Machine Learning (MLJ), Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS).