Dr. Liang Zhao is an assistant professor at the Department of Information Science and Technology 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, and interpretable machine learning.
He has published over 70 peer-reviewed full research papers in top-tier conferences and journals such as KDD, ICDM, TKDE, Proceedings of the IEEE, TKDD, TSAS, IJCAI, AAAI, WWW, CIKM, SIGSPATIAL, and SDM. He won Best Paper Award in ICDM 2019. He has also won Jeffress Trust Award in 2019, Outstanding Doctoral Student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech in 2017, NSF CRII Award in 2018, and was ranked as one of the "top 20 Rising Star in Data Mining" by Microsoft Search in 2016. He has been helping organize several prestigious venues such as KDD 2019, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020, SecureCom 2020, and SSTD 2017. He is co-chairing several workshops such as GeoAI 2019 co-located with SIGSPATIAL 2019 and DeepSpatial 2019 co-located with ICDM 2019.