Lu Cheng, Assistant Professor

Lu Cheng, Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago (UIC)

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). I lead the Responsible and Reliable AI Lab (R2 Lab). I received my PhD degree in Computer Science at Arizona State University (ASU) in 2022 advised by Dr. Huan Liu, M.Eng. degree in Industrial Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI), and B.Eng. degree in Industrial Engineering at Huazhong University of Science & Technology (HUST). My research interests are broadly in AI, with a particular focus on socially responsible AI (e.g., fairness, interpretability/explainability, and privacy) and reliable AI (e.g., robustness and uncertainty quantification), causal machine learning, and data mining in general. More details can be found in my CV.

Prospective students: I am constantly seeking curious and self-motivated PhD students. If you are one of these people, please email me your CV and transcript(s). Preference will be given to students who have worked with me before. I’m also happy to work with self-funded master’s and undergraduate students.

What is a PhD like? 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D./ Advice for students and junior researchers/ You and your research

News

  • [4/2025] Our survey paper Conformal Prediction: A Data Perspective is accepted to ACM Computing Survey.
  • [3/2025] Congrats to Shweta Girish Parihar (my first Master’s student) for successfully defending her Master’s thesis, which consists of two papers we recently submitted. She is currently on the job market, I highly recommend her!
  • [3/2025] Our workshop “SciSoc LLM Workshop: Large Language Models for Scientific and Societal Advances” accepted to KDD’25. Thank Wei Jin for leading this!
  • [2/2025] One paper accepted to SIGKDD Exploration.
  • [1/2025] One paper accepted to NAACL’25 Main Conference.
  • [12/2024] One paper accepted to AAAI’25.
  • [11/2024] One paper accepted to COLING’25.
  • [11/2024] Received the UIUC Center for Social & Behavioral Science (CSBS) Small Grant.
  • [10/2024] Received UIC IEHDSR seed funding as Co-PI.
  • [10/2024] Two papers accepted to IEEE Big Data’24.
  • [10/2024] Received Amazon Research Award, shared with my collaborator Hua Wei from ASU!
  • [10/2024] New survey paper: Conformal Prediction: A Data Perspective is now on arXiv.
  • [10/2024] 2 papers accepted to NeurIPS’24 workshop.
  • [09/2024] 1 paper accepted to NeurIPS’24 Main Track.
  • [09/2024] 4 papers accepted to EMNLP’24.
  • [09/2024] Super happy to represent UIC as a part of the SkAI institute, a Simons-NSF AI Institute! Our lab will explore responsible AI research and AI ethics training in the context of astronomy.
  • [09/2024] Invited to serve as ICLR’25 Area Chair.
  • [09/2024] Invited to serve as WSDM’25 Student Travel Award co-chair.
  • [07/2024] Received an NIH RO1 grant as a Co-I.
  • [07/2024] One paper accepted to DSAA’24.
  • [07/2024] Received an NSF grant “Track 2 Acquisition of a GPU Cluster for Accelerating HIPAA-Compliant Data-Driven Research” as a senior personnel. Thanks, NSF!
  • [07/2024] Invited to serve as a reviewer for Neurocomputing, KDD’25, and ACM TiiS.
  • [07/2024] Received a DHS grant as a Co-PI.
  • [07/2024] Two papers accepted to ASONAM’24.
  • [06/2024] Invited to serve as the EMNLP’24 Area Chair.
  • [06/2024] Our JORA paper is accepted to the ACL’24 System Demo Track.
  • [05/2024] Invited talk “Conformal Methods for Reliable and Fair Machine Learning” at the IDEAL Graph Representation Learning Workshop.
  • [05/2024] Our tutorial and survey paper “Safe Multi-Modal Machine Learning” are accepted to KDD’24.
  • [05/2024] Our NAIRR Pilot project on uncertainty quantification for LLMs has been selected!
  • [05/2024] Our paper “Conformalized Link Prediction on Graph Neural Networks” is accepted to KDD’24.
  • [05/2024] Our PAKDD’24 paper “Interpreting Pretrained Language Models via Concept Bottlenecks” receives the Best Paper Award.
  • [04/2024] Invited to serve as an Area Chair at ICDM’24.
  • [02/2024] Co-organizing the 2024 Web Conference workshop AI-Driven Online Advertising.
  • [02/2024] Two US patents are granted.
  • [01/2024] One paper accepted to PAKDD’24.
  • [01/2024] Invited to serve as a tutorial co-chair at IEEE Big Data’24.
  • [01/2024] Invited to serve on an NSF panel.