Graph Neural Networks: Foundations, Frontiers, and Applications (PDF)

his PhD degree from Tsinghua University in 2010. His research interests include data mining, machine learning and multimedia analysis, with expertise on network representation learning, causal inference and stable learning, social dynamics modeling, and user behavior modeling, etc. He is keen to promote the convergence and integration of causal inference and machine learning, addressing the fundamental issues of today's AI technology, including explainability, stability and fairness issues. He is recognized as a Distinguished Scientist of ACM, Distinguished Member of CCF and Senior Member of IEEE. He has published more than 100 papers in prestigious conferences and journals in machine learning and data mining. He is one of the most cited authors in network embedding. A number of his pro- posed algorithms on network embedding generate substantial impact in academia and industry. His recent research won the IEEE Multimedia Best Department Paper Award, IEEE ICDM2015 Best Student Paper Award, IEEE ICME 2014 Best Paper Award, ACM MM12 Grand Challenge Multimodal Award, MMM13 Best Paper Award, and were selected into the Best of KDD special issues in 2014 and 2016, respectively. He was PC co-chair of CIKM2019 and MMM2020, SPC or area chair of ICML, KDD, WWW, IJCAI, AAAI, etc., and Associate Editors of IEEE TKDE (2017-), IEEE TBD (2019-), ACM TIST(2018-), and ACM TOMM (2016-) etc. He received ACM China Rising Star Award in 2015, and CCF-IEEE CS Young Scientist Award in 2018.

Dr. Jian Pei is a Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He is a well-known leading researcher in the general areas of data science, big data, data mining, and database systems. His expertise is on developing effective and efficient data analysis techniques for novel data intensive applications, and transferring his research results to products and business practice. He is recognized as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Canada's national academy), the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is one of the most cited authors in data mining, database systems, and information retrieval. Since 2000, he has published one textbook, two monographs and over 300 research papers in refereed journals and conferences, which have been cited extensively by others. His research has generated remarkable impact substantially beyond academia. For example, his algorithms have been adopted by industry in production and popular open-source software suites. Jian Pei also demonstrated outstanding professional leadership in many academic organizations and activities. He was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) in 2013-16, the chair of the Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery in Data (SIGKDD) of the As- sociation for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2017-2021, and a general co-chair or program committee co-chair of many premier conferences. He maintains a wide spectrum of industry relations with both global and local industry partners. He is an active consultant and coach for industry on enterprise data strategies, healthcare informatics, network security intelligence, computational finance, and smart retail. He received many prestigious awards, including the 2017 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award, the 2015 ACM SIGKDD Service Award, the 2014 IEEE ICDM Re- search Contributions Award, the British Columbia Innovation Council 2005 Young Innovator Award, an NSERC 2008 Discovery Accelerator Supplements Award (100 awards cross the whole country), an IBM Faculty Award (2006), a KDD Best Ap- plication Paper Award (2008), an ICDE Influential Paper Award (2018), a PAKDD Best Paper Award (2014), a PAKDD Most Influential Paper Award (2009), and an IEEE Outstanding Paper Award (2007).

Dr. Liang Zhao is an assistant professor at the Department of Compute Science at Emory University. Before that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science and Technology and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. He obtained his PhD degree in 2016 from Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech in the United States. His research interests include data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, with special interests in spatiotemporal and network data mining, deep learning on graphs, nonconvex optimization, model parallelism, event prediction, and interpretable machine learning. He received AWS Ma- chine Learning Research Award in 2020 from Amazon Company for his research on distributed graph neural networks. He won NSF Career Award in 2020 awarded by National Science Foundation for his research on deep learning for spatial networks, and Jeffress Trust Award in 2019 for his research on deep generative models for bio- molecules, awarded by Jeffress Memorial Trust Foundation and Bank of America. He won the Best Paper Award in the 19th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2019) for the paper of his lab on deep graph transformation. He has also won Best Paper Award Shortlist in the 27th Web Conference (WWW 2021) for deep generative models. He was selected as "Top 20 Rising Star in Data Mining" by Microsoft Search in 2016 for his research on spatiotemporal data mining. He has also won Outstanding Doctoral Student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech in 2017. He is awarded as CI-Fellow Mentor 2021 by the Computing Community Consortium for his research on deep learning for spatial data. He has published numerous research papers in top-tier conferences and journals such as KDD, TKDE, ICDM, ICLR, Proceedings of the IEEE, ACM Computing Surveys, TKDD, IJCAI, AAAI, and WWW. He has been serving as organizers such as publication chair, poster chair, and session chair for many top-tier conferences such as SIGSPATIAL, KDD, ICDM, and CIKM.