Xia Ben Hu, Rice University

Associate Professor

Department of Computer Science
Rice University
Email: xia.hu at rice.edu
Google Scholar Page

Howdy!

I am an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Rice University. I am currently directing the DATA Lab, with my students and collaborators, we strive to develop automated and interpretable data mining and machine learning algorithms with theoretical properties to better discover actionable patterns from large-scale, networked, dynamic and sparse data. Our research is directly motivated by, and contributes to, applications in social informatics, health informatics and information security. Our work has been featured in Various News Media, such as MIT Tech Review, ACM TechNews, New Scientist, Fast Company, Economic Times. Our research is generously supported by federal agencies such as DARPA (XAI, D3M and NGS2) and NSF (CAREER, III, SaTC, CRII, S&AS), and industrial sponsors such as Adobe, Apple, Alibaba, Google, LinkedIn and JP Morgan. I was the General Co-Chair for WSDM 2020.

[Open Positions] We are recruiting PhD students, undergraduate students, and visiting scholars/students. Here you can find the job description. Please feel free to drop me an email with your CV.

News and Highlights

Incredible PhD students on 2020 job market: Ninghao Liu is looking for an academic position, Qingquan Song and Haifeng Jin are looking for industrial jobs. Please do drop me a msg if you need good people!

TODS: an end-to-end Python system for outlier detection.
[Website] | [Paper] | [Code] | [Video]

RLCard for easily developing Reinforcement Learning in Card Games such as Texas Hold'em and Doudizhu.
[Website] | [Paper] | [Code] | [Video]

Auto-Keras system (over 7,000 stars and 1,000 forks on Github) on automated machine learning.
[Website] | [Paper] | [Code]

The Neural Collaborative Filtering algorithm has been widely adopted in many open-source systems. [Paper]
[TensorFlow Official] | [NVidia Implementation in TF] | [Microsoft Implementation in TF] | [MLCommons in Pytorch] | [Villina Version]

Detecting Interactions from Neural Networks via Topological Analysis. NeurIPS, 2020.

An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Trojan Attack in Deep Neural Networks. KDD, 2020.

Fairness in Deep Learning: A Computational Perspective. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2020.

Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning. Highlighted Article, Janurary 2020 issue, CACM.

Auto-Keras: An Efficient Neural Architecture Search System. KDD, 2019.

On Attribution of Recurrent Neural Network Predictions via Additive Decomposition. WWW, 2019.

Adversarial Detection with Model Interpretation. KDD, 2018.

Towards Explanation of DNN-based Prediction with Guided Feature Inversion. KDD, 2018.

Neural Collaborative Filtering. WWW, 2017.

Label Informed Attributed Network Embedding. WSDM, 2017.

More - Not That New News

Honors and Awards

Best Paper Award Candidate, ICDM 2019
Best Poster Award, INFORMS 2019
Best Student Paper Award Finalist, INFORMS QSR 2019
Best Student Paper Award, IISE QCRE 2019
Best Paper Award Shortlist, WWW 2019
Adobe Data Science Research Award, 2019
JP Morgan AI Research Faculty Award, 2019
Dean of Engineering Excellence Award, Texas A&M University, 2019
NSF CAREER Award, 2018
TEES Young Faculty Fellow, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, 2018
Engineering Genesis Award, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, 2017
PEPI Award, NSF South BD Hub, 2016
Best Paper Award, IJCAI BOOM Workshop, 2016
Outstanding Graduate Student Award, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, Arizona State University, 2015
Atluri Award, Phoenix Section Student Scholarship, IEEE Foundation, 2015
President's Award for Innovation, Arizona State University, 2014
Best Paper Award Shortlist, WSDM 2013

Background

I received my PhD from Arizona State University under the supervision of Dr. Huan Liu. I received my Master and Bachelor degrees from Beihang University. Before my current position, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University and Phoenix Veteran Affairs Health Care System, a research intern at Microsoft Research, and a visiting student at National University of Singapore with Dr. Tat-Seng Chua.