Lu Cheng

Lu Cheng

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 data mining and machine learning, with a particular focus on socially responsible AI, causal machine learning, and AI for social good.

**Prospective students**: I am always actively looking for self-motivated PhD students to conduct research in 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. I'm also happy to work with self-funded masters and undergraduate students. Interested students please email me with your CV and transcript(s).

News

  • [10/2023] Invited to give a talk at Case Western Reserve University.
  • [10/2023] One paper accepted to UbiComp’23.
  • [09/2023] One paper accepted to NeurIPS’23.
  • [09/2023] Our workshop on Responsible Language Models is accepted to AAAI’24. Co-organizing with Vector Institute for AI.
  • [09/2023] Invited to give a talk at Pacific Causal Inference Conference 2023, Sept 16-17. Beijing, China
  • [08/2023] Invited to give a talk at NSF Tripods Workshop on Privacy, Fairness and Causality in Graphs. UCSC. Oct 19-20.
  • [08/2023] Received an NSF III Medium grant as a Co-PI. Thanks, NSF!
  • [08/2023] Two papers accepted to CIKM’23.
  • [07/2023] Invited to give a talk at LMU Munich.
  • [07/2023] One paper accepted to ECAI’23.
  • [06/2023] Invited to serve as a Senior PC member for AAAI’24.
  • [06/2023] Thrilled to win the runner-up of the 2022-23 INNS Doctoral Dissertation Award!
  • [06/2023] One paper accepted to ACL’23 Clinical NLP workshop.
  • [05/2023] Invited to serve as a reviewer for ACM Computing Surveys and IEEE TKDE, a PC member for IEEE CogMI’23.
  • [04/2023] Our work on intersectional fairness is accepted to IJCAI’23 Survey Track.
  • [04/2023] Invited to serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS’23 and IEEE Big Data’23.
  • [02/2023] Invited to serve as a PC member for ECML PKDD’23, ICDM’23, ACL’23, and UAI’23.
  • [01/2023] Invited to serve as a PC member for KDD’23 and a reviewer for ACM Computing Surveys.
  • [01/2023] Receiving a gift grant from Cisco Research for the project on Privacy-Preserving GNNs. Thanks, Cisco!
  • [12/2022] Invited to serve as a PC member for IJCAI ‘23 and a reviewer for the Journal of Pattern Recognition.
  • [11/2022] Invited to serve on an NSF III CRII panel.
  • [10/2022] Invited to serve as a PC member for the Web Conference’23.
  • [10/2022] Invited to serve on an NSF HCC panel.
  • [08/2022] Joined UIC Computer Science Department as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor.