D2K's New Director, Xia “Ben” Hu and Rice CS’ DATA Lab win Outstanding Paper at ICML 2022

Director of Rice D2K Lab Ben Hu won ICML Outstanding Paper

Congratulations to Dr. Xia (Ben) Hu and his group for receiving the Outstanding Paper Award at ICML 2022. Their work on G-Mixup graph augmentation substantially improves graph neural networks. 

"It is such a pleasant surprise to receive this prestigious award out of 6,000 submissions this year," said Dr. Hu, associate professor of computer science (CS), the new director of the D2K Lab.

“This is a milestone in this research area, to make use of a very specific technology called a graphon for graph augmentation,” says Hu. “It’s a major achievement for network analytics and an accumulation of a decade of research.”

Read more about his Outstanding Paper Award on the CS website.

 

Hu has been named the new D2K director, succeeding D2K founder Genevera Allen, who started the center in 2018.

“Ben is the right choice for being the new director, given his expertise in data mining, data science and machine learning. Ben is no stranger to the D2K, having participated in its activities since he joined Rice a year ago,” said Luay Nakhleh, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Hu earned his Ph.D. in CS from Arizona State University in 2015. His research focuses on interpretable machine learning, automated machine learning and network analytics.

Read more about his official announcement on the School of Engineering website.

 

 


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