Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
Email: xia.hu at rice.edu
Google Scholar Page
I am an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Rice University. With my students and collaborators, we strive to develop automated and interpretable machine learning algorithms and systems to better discover actionable patterns from large-scale, networked, dynamic and sparse data. Our research is motivated by, and contributes to, applications in social informatics, health informatics and information security.
Our work has led to research publications in major academic venues, including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, IJCAI, etc. An open-source package developed by our group, namely AutoKeras, has become the most used automated deep learning system on Github (with over 8,000 stars and 1,000 forks). Our work on deep collaborative filtering, anomaly detection and knowledge graphs have been included in the TensorFlow package, Apple production system and Bing production system, respectively. Our papers have received several Best Paper (Candidate) awards from venues such as ICML, WWW, WSDM, ICDM, AMIA and INFORMS, and also 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), NSF (CAREER, III, SaTC, CRII, S&AS), NIH and industrial sponsors such as Adobe, Apple, Google, LinkedIn and JP Morgan. I was the General Co-Chair for WSDM 2020 and ICHI 2023, and the Program Chair for AIHC 2024.