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 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 (2~3 GRAs + 2 GTAs) and one postdoc (Virginia Tech Presidential Fellowship) to join my group in the Fall 2024 semester.
My current research includes but is not limited to the following topics:
Long-tail category analysis (e.g., generalization, pre-trained model)
Transfer learning across graphs (e.g., evolving domain discrepancy, data augmentation)
Symbolic reasoning and learning on knowledge graphs (e.g., question answering, recommendation)
Trustworthy learning on graphs (e.g., fairness, calibration, robustness)
Deep graph generative model for scientific domains (e.g., PPI network, ARG prediction, 3D molecular conformation)
Machine learning for finance (e.g., financial forecasting, financial fraud detection)
Students with CS, math, biostatistics, and EE background 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
[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.
[12/2024]: We will organize workshops on Scientific Hypothesis Generation and Validation, together with Stanford, Dartmouth, UC-Davis, and PSU, at ICLR 2025 and WWW 2025. Please stay tuned!
[11/2024]: Invited to give a talk on Scientific Hypothesis Generation at the second annual meeting of Artificial Intelligence for Primary Immune Disorders and Inborn Errors of Immunity, which will take place in New York City, USA from March 19th -21st , 2025.
[11/2024]: One paper on Multi-Modal Predictive Maintenance is accepted by KDD2025. Congrats to my student Shuaicheng as the leading author!
[10/2024]: Invited to give a talk at the CS Seminar Series, University of Rochester.
[9/2024]: One paper on Heterogeneous Long-Tailed Learning is accepted by NeurIPS2024. Congrats to my student Haohui as the leading author!
[9/2024]: Invited to give a talk at the Oak Ridge Lab’s Core Universities AI Workshop 2024.
[9/2024]: Invited to give a talk at the Amazon - Virginia Tech Initiative for Efficient and Robust Machine Learning.
[9/2024]: Congratulations to my postdoc Adithya for receiving his first gift grant from Artificial Intelligence Journal as PI, which will be used to support our workshop on Scientific Hypothesis Creation and Validation.
[9/2024]: I am delighted to be invited to serve as the Student Travel Award Chair for ACM CIKM 2025, which will be held in Seoul, Korea.
[9/2024]: Honored to receive a new grant from NSF-SCH program as co-PI to support our research on Multi-Modal Human-AI Teaming.
[8/2024]: I am delighted to be invited to serve as the Social Media and Publicity Chair for ACM SIGKDD 2025, which will be held in Toronto, ON, Canada.
[7/2024]: Honored to receive a new grant from DARPA SciFy as VT PI to support our research on Scientific Hypothesis Validation.
[7/2024]: Honored to receive an Amazon Gifted Grant as PI to support our research on Collaborative Recommender Agents.
[7/2024]: I am invited to serve as the Local Chair for IEEE BigData 2024, which will be held in Washington, D.C.
[6/2024]: Honored to receive the NSF Career Award as PI to support our research on Open-World Machine Learning!
[6/2024]: I am invited to serve as the Senior Program Committee Member of AAAI 2025.
[5/2024]: One paper on Long-Tail Generalization is accepted by SIGKDD 2024. Congrats to my student Haohui as the leading author!
[5/2024]: Honored to receive a new grant from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as PI to support our research on Combating Dynamic and Networked Financial Crimes.
[5/2024]: Two papers have been accepted by ICML2024. Congrats to my student Haohui for her first leading-author paper on Dynamic Non-iid Transfer Learning!
[4/2024]: One paper on Benchmarking 3D Molecule Learning with Functional Groups has been accepted by IJCAI2024. Congrats to my students Tingwei and Jianpeng!
[4/2024]: Congrats to my students Haohui and Shuaicheng, who have been selected as the CCI Cyber Innovation Scholar again!
[2/2024]: Honored to receive a new grant from DARPA FoundSci as VT PI to support our research on 3D Metamaterial Synthesis via Large Graph-Language Foundation Model.
[1/2024]: I am invited to serve as the Editor of Elsevier Big Data Research.
[1/2024]: I am invited to serve as the Proceedings Chair for ACM SIGKDD 2024, which will be held in Barcelona, Spain.
Sponsors
Contact
Office: 3160 F, Torgersen Hall, 620 Drillfield Dr., Blacksburg, VA 24060
Phone: (540) 231-2642
Email: zhoud [at] vt [dot] edu