I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University under the supervision of Dr. Tyler Derr and a member of the Network and Data Science (NDS) lab. I completed my BS and MS in Computer Science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2018 and 2021, respectively, where I received the university’s “Outstanding Graduate” award for both my BS degree and MS degree.

• Curriculum Vitae
• Email: yuying (dot) zhao (at) vanderbilt (dot) edu

Research Interest

My research interests lie in responsible AI focusing on beyond-utility perspectives including fairness, explainability, and diversity. Additionally, I am fascinated by the powerful representation ability of graphs. I am broadly interested in analyzing all kinds of graph data, ranging from social media networks, coauthorship relationships, dating networks, biology graphs, EHR graphs in the healthcare domain, and so on.

News

• 07/2023: The article “Progress and Promise: The Shifting Landscape of Gender in STEM” is available on KDD’23 blog.
• 07/2023: Our paper “Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey” is available.
• 06/2023: Received Student Travel Award for the SIGKDD’23 to be held at Long Beach.
• 06/2023: Our paper “Fair Online Dating Recommendations for Sexually Fluid Users via Leveraging Opposite Gender Interaction Ratio” has been accepted by Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG) at KDD’23.
• 06/2023: Our paper “The Friendship Paradox: An Analysis on Signed Social Networks with Positive and Negative Links” has been accepted by Undergraduate Consortium at KDD’23.
• 05/2023: Received C.F. Chen Best Paper Runner-Up Award in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University.
• 04/2023: Our paper “ADEPT: Autoencoder with Differentially Expressed Genes and Imputation For A Robust Spatial Transcriptomics Clustering” is accepted by Journal iScience.
• 03/2023: Selected to participate in the SDM’23 Doctoral Forum and to receive the student travel award.
• 03/2023: Our paper “ADEPT: Autoencoder with Differentially Expressed Genes and Imputation For A Robust Spatial Transcriptomics Clustering” is accepted by RECOMB-SEQ 2023.
• 01/2023: Our paper “Collaboration-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Recommender Systems” is accepted by TheWebConf’23.
• 01/2023: Glad that I passed my preliminary exam.
• 12/2022: Glad to join Visa as a PhD research intern for Summer’23.
• 12/2022: Awarded AAAI-23 Student Scholarships and selected as volunteers.
• 11/2022: Our paper “Fairness and Explainability: Bridging the Gap Towards Fair Model Explanations” is accepted by AAAI’23.
• 08/2022: Our paper “Imbalanced Graph Classification via Graph-of-Graph Neural Networks” is accepted by CIKM’22.
• 07/2022: Our paper “Collaboration-Aware Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation Systems” is available now.
• 07/2022: Our paper “Inferring EHR Utilization Workflows through Audit Logs” is accepted by AMIA’22.
• 06/2022: Awarded free registration for KDD’22.
• 05/2022: Our paper “Improving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Mitigating Sensitive Attribute Leakage” is accepted by KDD’22.
• 04/2022: Poster presentation at SDM’22 Doctoral Forum.
• 04/2022: Awarded the SDM’22 travel award.
• 03/2022: Previous work on Influence Maximization has been promoted by CCF database committe.
• 02/2022: Give a guest lecture on Information Diffusion and Influence Maximization.

Publications

2023

• [TheWebConf’23] Collaboration-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommendation Systems [Paper][Code]
  • Yu Wang, Yuying Zhao, Yi Zhang, Tyler Derr
• [AAAI’23] Fairness and Explainability: Bridging the Gap Towards Fair Model Explanations [Paper][Code]
  • Yuying Zhao, Yu Wang, Tyler Derr

2022

• [CIKM] Imbalanced Graph Classification via Graph-of-Graph Neural Networks [Paper][Code]
  • Yu Wang, Yuying Zhao, Neil Shah, Tyler Derr
• [KDD] Improving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Mitigating Sensitive Attribute Leakage [Paper][Code]
  • Yu Wang, Yuying Zhao, Yushun Dong, Huiyuan Chen, Jundong Li, Tyler Derr
• [AMIA] Inferring EHR Utilization Workflows through Audit Logs
  • Yuying Zhao*, Xinmeng Zhang*, Chao Yan, Tyler Derr, You Chen

Before 2022

• [DSE journal] Maximizing Influence over Streaming Graphs with Query Sequence [Paper]
  • Yuying Zhao, Yunfei Hu, Pingpeng Yuan, Hai Jin
• [CSCWD] Grace: An Efficient Parallel SPARQL Query System over Large-Scale RDF Data [Paper]
  • Xiang Kang, Yuying Zhao, Pingpeng Yuan, Hai Jin

* denotes co-first author.

Preprints and Submissions

• Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey [Paper]
  • Yuying Zhao, Yu Wang, Yunchao Liu, Xueqi Cheng, Charu Aggarwal, Tyler Derr
• A Survey on Privacy in Graph Neural Networks: Attacks, Preservation, and Applications
  • Yi Zhang, Yuying Zhao, Zhaoqing Li, Xueqi Cheng, Yu Wang, Olivera Kotevska, Philip Yu, Tyler Derr

Symposiums and Workshops

• Yuying Zhao. Learning Beyond Utility: Fairness, Explainability, Diversity. International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) Doctoral Forum, SIAM, Poster, 2023.
• Yuying Zhao. Improving Fairness via Fair Explanation. International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) Doctoral Forum, SIAM, Poster, 2022.