Dawei Zhou

Bio

Dr. Dawei Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of Virginia Tech and the director of the VirginiaTech Learning on Graphs (VLOG) Lab. Zhou's major research interest lies in Open-World Machine Learning (OpenML), with applications in AI for Material Science, AI for Finance, and AI for healthcare. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has authored more than 60 publications in premier academic venues across AI, data mining, and information retrieval (e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ICDM, SDM, TKDD, DMKD, WWW, CIKM) and has served as Vice Program Chair/Proceeding Chair/Student Travel Award Chair/Local Chair/ Session Chairs/(Senior) Program Committee Members in various top ML and AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, WWW, SIGIR, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, BigData, etc.). His research is generously supported by Virginia Tech, NSF, DARPA, DHS, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, 4VA, Deloitte, Amazon, and Cisco. His work has been recognized by the 24th CNSF Capitol Hill Science Exhibition, Cisco Faculty Research Award (2023), AAAI New Faculty Highlights Roster (2024), NSF Career Award (2024), National Distinction Program (2025), and Virginia Tech Outstanding Assistant Professor Award (2025).

VLOG Lab

Lab Openings

I am actively looking for self-motivated Ph.D. students (3 GRAs + 2 GTAs) and one postdoc (Virginia Tech Presidential Fellowship) to join my group in the Fall 2026 semester.

My current research includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

Scientific Hypothesis Discovery and Evaluation (e.g., mechanical material [ICML'25-UniMate], evaluation [KDD'25-MetamatBench], disorder protein-protein interaction [DISPROTBENCH])
Artificial Long-Tail Intelligence (e.g., representation learning [KDD'24-HierTail], benchmark [NeurIPS'24-HeroLT])
LLM (e.g., generalization [ICML'25-LensLLM], hallucination, in-context learning, and reasoning)
Dynamic Ontology and Concept Drift in Open Worlds (e.g., evolving domain discrepancy [ICML'24-EvoluNet])
Machine learning for finance (e.g., financial forecasting [WWW'20-Dandelion], financial fraud detection [TKDD'20-HOSGRAP])
AI Safety (e.g., uncertainty quantification [KDD'25-NCPNet][WWW'25-QuaCov], evidential reasoning [KDD'25-EviNet], data sanitation [ICAIF'23-TGEditor], autonomous driving [KDD'25-DVBench])

Students with CS, Statistics, and Physics backgrounds are particularly encouraged to apply! Please drop me an email (zhoud[at]vt[dot]edu) with your CV and transcripts if you are interested.

News

[9/2025]: Congratulations to my PhD student Fatimah Alotaibi on successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on symbolic reasoning in open and dynamic worlds!
[9/2025]: One paper on Adaptive Spectral Graph Filter is accepted by NeurIPS2025. Congrats to my student Shuaicheng and Haohui as the leading author!
[8/2025]: Two papers have been accepted by EMNLP 2025. Congrats to my students Tuo and Joshua as the leading authors!
[7/2025]: Big congrats to my student Haohui for being awarded by the Amazon Fellowship for the 2025 - 2026 academic year.
[7/2025]: Honored to receive a new award from NSF IIS-III Core Program to support our research on Open-World Foundation Models. Grateful for the opportunity to push the boundaries of open-world learning!
[6/2025]: I am delighted to serve as the Proceedings Chair for ACM SIGKDD 2026, which will be held in Jeju, Korean.
[5/2025]: Five papers have been accepted by KDD2025. Congrats to my students Shuaicheng, Jianpeng, Weijie, Tuo, Tong as the leading authors!
[5/2025]: Two papers have been accepted by ICML 2025. Congrats to my student Xinyue and Wangzhi for their first leading-author papers on LLM Scaling Law and Metamaterial Design, respectively!
[5/2025]: Honored to receive AWS computing credits from Amazon for our research on the Agentic Recommender System.
[3/2025]: I’m honored to be selected as a recipient of the COE Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award at Virginia Tech! I’m deeply grateful for this recognition and excited to continue my work alongside such a supportive and inspiring community.
[3/2025]: Honored to receive a cloud computing grant from Google for our research on Scientific Agentic AI.
[3/2025]: Four VLOG students have secured research internships at Microsoft Research and Amazon this summer—one with Microsoft Research, two with Amazon AGI and one with Amazon FireTV. Congratulations to Shuaicheng, Longfeng, Joshua, and Tong on the exciting news!
[3/2025]: Congrats to my postdoc Adithya, who will start as a tenure-track assistant professor at Ball State University!
[2/2025]: I am honored to have been selected for the National Distinction Program at Virginia Tech. This nomination recognizes my contributions and performance since joining Virginia Tech in 2022. I am grateful for this acknowledgment and look forward to continuing my work with such a supportive community.
[2/2025]: I am delighted to serve as the Workshop Chair for IEEE BigData 2025, which will be held in Macau, China.
[1/2025]: One paper on Theoretical Insights and Practical Strategies for Equalized Coverage is accepted by WWW2025. Congrats to my student Longfeng as the leading author!
[1/2025]: Honored to receive a new grant from the National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence as co-PI to support our research on the Traffic-Oriented Vision-language Model.
[1/2025]: Honored to receive a new grant from Commonwealth Cyber Initiative as PI to support our research on Scientific Agentic AI.
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