Arlei Silva

I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I'm also a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Responsible AI and Computing for Global Impact.

My research focuses on developing algorithms and models for mining and learning from complex datasets, broadly defined as data science, especially for data represented as graphs/networks.

I'm particularly interested in problems motivated by computational social science, infrastructure, and healthcare. The tools that I apply to address these problems include machine learning, network science, graph theory, linear algebra, optimization, and statistics.

I got a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Ambuj Singh, where I was also a postdoctoral scholar. Before that, I got a B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in Brazil, advised by Wagner Meira Jr. I've also been a visiting scholar at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, hosted by Mohammed J. Zaki.

My name is pronounced approximately as ARE-LAY.
Pronouns: he/him/his.

E-mail: arlei@rice.edu

Teaching:

Graduate Seminar on Machine Learning (Fall)
Machine Learning with Graphs (Spring)

Recent publications:

Breaking the Dyadic Barrier: Rethinking Fairness in Link Prediction Beyond Demographic Parity
Joao Mattos, Debolina Halder Lina, Arlei Silva
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026.

Cross-Domain Graph Anomaly Detection via Test-Time Training with Homophily-Guided Self-Supervision
Delaram Pirhayatifard, Arlei Silva
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025.
Also presented at the Learning on Graphs Conference (LoG), 2025.

Attribute-Enhanced Similarity Ranking for Sparse Link Prediction
Joao Mattos, Zexi Huang, Mert Kosan, Ambuj Singh, Arlei Silva
ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025.

Pluvial Flood Emulation with Hydraulics-informed Message Passing
Arnold Kazadi, James Doss-Gollin, Arlei Silva
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.

FloodGNN-GRU: A Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Flood Prediction
Arnold Kazadi, James Doss-Gollin, Antonia Sebastian, Arlei Silva
Environmental Data Science (EDS), 2024.

Rearchitecting Datacenter Networks: A New Paradigm with Optical Core and Optical Edge
Sushovan Das, Arlei Silva, T. S. Eugene Ng
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2024.