About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD), Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore. I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore in 2018. My supervisors are Prof. Zhang Jie and Dr. Xu Chi. 

I am leading the Trustworthy User Modelling and Personalization (TUMP) Lab at SUTD, mainly focusing on (1) designing trustworthy recommendation algorithms--robust, diverse, fair, explainable, and privacy-preserving--by applying cutting-edge techniques, e.g., LLMs, across various domains like e-commerce, multimedia, location-based social networks, and healthcare; (2) developing LLM-based user simulators for human-centric evaluation and optimisation of recommender systems; and (3) benchmarking recommender systems through rigorous evaluation and fair comparison by advancing open-source libraries DaisyRec and DaisyRec-v2.0. 

Research Interests

• User Modelling and Personalization, Recommender Systems

• Large Language Models, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning

• AI+X: Healthcare, Law

Open Positions

• 📢 Call for Full-Time PhD Applicants, Fully-supported by SUTD/AISG/SINGA/SUTD-NUS Joint PhD Programme (Send CV to: zhu_sun@sutd.edu.sg) 

• 📢 Call for China Scholar Council Visting PhD Applicants

What is New?

• [Nov 2025] I will serve as the Program Chair of Singapore ACM SIGKDD Symposium 2026!

• [Nov 2025] One paper has been accepted by KDD 2026. Congratulations to all co-authors!

• [Nov 2025] Welcome Huigui Yan to our team as a Visiting PhD student!

• [Nov 2025] Welcome Prof. Li Zhou to our team as a Visiting Professor!

• [Nov 2025] Welcome Yu Lei to our team as a Visiting PhD student!

• [Nov 2025] Two papers have been accepted by AAAI  2026 (1 Main Track and one Student Abstract). Congratulations to all co-authors!

• [Oct 2025] I was invited to give a talk on trustworthy generative recommender systems for social connections at Ola Chat.

• [Oct 2025] Welcome Mao Li to our team as a Visiting PhD student!

• [Oct 2025] Welcome Huizhong Guo to our team as a Visiting PhD student!

• [Oct 2025] I was invited to give a talk on generative models for recommendation at Lorong AI, Singapore!

• [Sep 2025] I was invited to give a talk on generative models for recommendation at the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Singapore!

• [Sep 2025] Welcome Zihang Luo to our team as a PhD student!

• [Sep 2025] One paper was accepted by IEEE TEVC 2025. Congratulations to all co-authors!

• [Sep 2025] Welcome Zhuoxuan Huang to our team as a Visiting PhD student!

• [Aug 2025] I was invited to give a talk on generative recommendation at Huawei Hong Kong Research Center (HKRC)!

• [Aug 2025] I was invited to give a talk on generative recommendation at the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU)!

• [Aug 2025] Welcome Lingfeng Huang to our team as a Research Assistant! 

• [Aug 2025] I have been appointed as the Undergraduate Consortium Co-Chair of AAAI 2026!

• [May 2025] One paper was accepted by KDD 2025.

• [May 2025] One paper was accepted by ACM TOIS 2025.

• [Apr 2025] I was awarded the 2025 TL@SUTD Seed Research Project Grant as the PI!

• [Apr 2025] I was invited as a mentor for the PhD Symposium at TheWebConf 2025 .

• [Apr 2025] I was invited to give a talk titled "Leveraging LLMs for Recommendation" at the Women in the Web session of TheWebConf 2025.

• [Apr 2025] I received the Rising Stars of Women in Web Award at TheWebConf, 2025!

• [Apr 2025] One paper was accepted by ACM TOIS 2025.

• [Apr 2025] One paper was accepted by SIGIR 2025.

• [Mar 2025] One paper was accepted by Neural Networks 2025.

• [Feb 2025] Our paper "Revisiting Bundle Recommendation for Intent-aware Product Bundling" has been selected as ACM TORS 2024 Featured Article!

• [Feb 2025] I was invited to join the Editorial Board of Memetic Computing for 2025.

• [Jan 2025] One paper was accepted by Neural Networks 2025.

• [Jan 2025] One paper was accepted by TheWebConf 2025 as an oral presentation!

• [Jan 2025] One paper was accepted by ACM TOIS, 2025.

• [Dec 2024] My PhD Student Sun Yatong at MQ was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Commendation for his PhD Thesis - Congratulations 🎉🎉🎉!

• [Dec 2024] I was awarded the 2024 SUTD Kickstarter Initiative (SKI) Grant as the PI!

• [Dec 2024] Three research papers were accepted by AAAI, 2025.

• [Dec 2024] One paper was accepted by IJHCI, 2024.

• [Nov 2024] One paper was accepted by ACM TIST, 2024.

• [Oct 2024] I received the Outstanding Reviewer Award at ACM RecSys, 2024.

• [Jul 2024] One paper was accepted by ACM RecSys, 2024.

• [Jul 2024] We received a Best Paper Nomination at SIGIR, 2024.

• [May 2024] Two research papers were accepted by KDD, 2024.

• [Mar 2024] Four research papers were accepted by SIGIR, 2024.