About me

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa. My research interest lies in data mining and machine learning, with a focus on dynamical processes on large networks. My recent works include machine learning on graphs, network structure optimization, graph mining to mitigate healthcare-associated infections, mining clinical data for personalized patient risk prediction, e-commerce search and fraud detection, outbreak detection in hospitals, and so on.

I am also a member of the inter-disciplinary Computational Epidemiology Group , where I primarily investigate problems motivated by public health such as propagation of diseases via contact network, forecasting outbreaks of infectious diseases, and designing optimal surveillance systems.

Prior to joining UIowa, I received my PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech under the supervision of Prof. B. Aditya Prakash. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Vistula University in Warsaw, Poland.

News

  • 08-2026: [Paper] A research track paper accepted to CIKM 2026. Congratulations to Mihail and Jeff.
  • 05-2026: [Paper] Two research track papers accepted to KDD 2026. Congratulations to Hieu, Mihail, and Akash.
  • 05-2026: [Student] Hieu is starting his internship at Meta. Good luck to him!
  • 05-2026: [Paper] Our paper on `Machine-learned Comorbidity Score' was accepted to ICML 2026! Congratulations to Suleman!
  • 04-2026: [Paper] Our paper on `Linking Attentional Modulation to Auditory Attention Decoding' was accepted for publication in Trends in Hearing journal. Congratulations to my collaborators!
  • 04-2026: [Grant] Thrilled to share that our group has received support from National Association of County and City Health Officials. Congratulations to PI Dr. Polgreen.
  • 03-2026: [Paper] Two papers accepted to IEEE ICHI. Congratulations to my collaborators!
  • 01-2026: [Conference] I am attending AAAI 2026. Come say hello if you are also there!
  • 01-2026: [Paper] Our paper on ``Real-time Cohorting of Nursing Care into Bubbles'' got accepted to AAMAS as an oral paper. Congratulations to Jeff!
  • 10-2025: [Paper] Our paper on ``Implicit Hypergraph Neural Networks'' got accepted to IEEE BigData as a regular paper. Congratulations to Aakash and Yongjian.
  • 06-2025: [Students] Mihail and Suleman have joined our group. Welcome!
  • 07-2025: [Paper] Our paper ``Analyzing greedy vaccine allocation algorithms for metapopulation disease models'' got accepted to PLoS Computational Biology. Congratulations to Jeff and Akash.
  • 06-2025: [Conference] I will be attending ICML 2025. See you in Vancouver.
  • 06-2025: [Conference] I am honored to be recognized as an OUTSTANDING reviewer (top 10% of reviewers) by KDD 2025.
  • 06-2025: [Paper] Our paper titled ``Contact Observations from an Intensive Care Unit'' got accepted to Nature Scientific Data. Congratulations to Hieu.
  • 06-2025: [Paper] Our paper on generating synthetic mobility logs in healthcare facilities got accepted to ECML/PKDD. Congratulations to Hieu!.
  • 06-2025: [Student] Akash is starting his internship at Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. Congratulations and good luck to him!
  • 05-2025: [Paper] Our paper on implicit subgraph neural network was accepted at ICML 2025! Congratulations to Yongjian, Liao, and Hieu.
  • 03-2025: [Conference] I am honored to give a keynote address at the DS2MH workshop at SDM 2025. Many thanks to the workshop organizers.
  • 03-2025: [Student] Akash has been awarded the Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship for Fall 2025. Congratulations to him!
  • 01-2025: [Grant] I am thrilled to share that I have received the NSF CAREER award to develop online algorithms to combat Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs) and Antimicrobial Resistance Organisms (AMROs) outbreaks.
  • 12-2024: [Paper] Our paper on conformal link prediction was accepted at SDM 2025. Congratulations to my students Akash and Yongjian. In total, three papers accepted at SDM 2025!
  • 12-2024: [Paper] Our paper on domain knowledge aware contrastive learning for health applications was accepted at SDM 2025. Congratulations to my students Akash and Hieu.
  • 12-2024: [Paper] Our paper on estimating unobserved infections during epidemics was accepted at SDM 2025.
  • 08-2024: [Conference] We are organizing the seventh iteration of the epiDAMIK workshop at SIGKDD 2024.
  • 06-2024: [Paper] Our paper on "Efficient and Effective Implicit Dynamic Graph Neural Network " was accepted for presentation at SIGKDD 2024. Congratulations to my students Yongjian and Hieu.
  • 05-2024: [Paper] Our paper on "Hospitalizations Among Family Members Increase the Risk of MRSA Infection in a Household " was accepted for publication in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
  • 04-2024: [Conference] Organizing IEEE Big Data 2024 as a Vice-Co-Chair for Big Data Search and Mining.
  • 03-2024: [Paper] Our paper on "End-to-End Risk-aware Reinforcement Learning to Detect Asymptomatic Cases in Healthcare Facilities" was accepted at IEEE ICHI 2024. Congratulations to my students Yongjian and Weiyu.
  • 03-2024: [Paper] Excited to Share that our paper titled "Learning to Rank Complex Biomedical Hypotheses for Accelerating Scientific Discovery" was accepted at IEEE ICHI 2024. Thanks to the collaborators from Jha lab (ECE@UIowa) for leading this effort.
  • 01-2024: [Conference] Very Excited to join the Organization Committee of IEEE BIG DATA 2024 (being held in Washington DC in December 2024) as Vice Co-Chair for Big Data Search and Mining.
  • 09-2023: [Grant] I am excited to share that our interdisciplinary team has received $500,000 NSF Collaborative Cyber-training grant. Congratulations to my collaborators Vidya Samadi (PI - Clemson University), Irbahim Demir (PI - University of Iowa), David Boyer (Co-PI - Clemson University) and Anthony Castranova (PI - CUAHSI).
  • 08-2023: [Paper] Our paper on continually adaptive representation learning framework for time-sensitive healthcare application was accepted at CIKM 2023. Congratulations to Akash and Hankyu.
  • 07-2023: [Grant] I am excited to share that our interdisciplinary team has received $1.2M NSF Smart and Connected Health grant to develop personalized hearing aids using Artificial Intelligence. Congratulations to my collaborators Octav Chipara (PI - Computer Science), Yu-Hsiang Wu (Communication Sciences and Disorders) and Inyong Choi (Communication Sciences and Disorders).
  • 06-2023: [Grant] Excited (and thankful) to share that our group (including Phil Polgreen (PI), Alberto Segre and other colleagues from the Department of Internal Medicine) has received 18 months $220,000 OVPR Interdisciplinary Scholars grant to design computational approaches for identifying Cystic Fibrosis carriers. 06-2023: [Conference] Will be attending KDD this year. See you in Long Beach!
  • 06-2023: [Paper] Our demo paper on extracting spatial graphs for CAD files has been accepted at ECML/PKDD 2023. Congratulations to Pratik and Masahiro.
  • 04-2023: [Conference] We are organizing the sixth iteration of the epiDAMIK workshop at SIGKDD 2023. Check the workshop's website for more details.
  • 02-2023: [Paper] Our paper on challenges in forecasting antimicrobial resistance has been accepted for publication in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.
  • 11-2022: [Paper] Two papers accepted at AAAI 2023. Thanks and Congratulations to the co-authors of both the papers.
  • 11-2022: [Conference] I will be attending IEEE ICDM 2022 in Nov. See you in Orlando!
  • 11-2022: [Paper] Hankyu’s ASONAM paper has won the Best Student Paper (Runner-up) award. Congratulations to Hankyu.

Funding

Active

  • [Co-Investigator] NACCHO EMERGING INFECTIONS NETWORK - Iowa. (2026-2026) Total amount: $375,000
  • [Sole Principal Investigator] NSF CAREER: Online Algorithms for Real-time Interventions against Healthcare Associated Infections. (2025-2030) Total amount: $600,000
  • [Site Principal Investigator] NSF Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Implementation: Small: Inclusive Cyberinfrastructure and Machine Learning Training to Advance Water Science Research. (2023-2026). Total Amount: $500,000
  • [Co-Principal Investigator] NSF SCH: Shallow and Deep Personalization for Hearing Aids. (2023-2027). Total Amount: $1.2M

Completed

  • [Co-Investigator] UIowa OVPR Interdisciplinary Scholars Grant. (2022-2025) Total amount: $220,000
  • [Principal Investigator] UIowa OVPR Jumpstarting Tomorrow Health Disparities and Machine Learning Community Feasibility Grant. (2021-2022) Total amount: $25,000
  • [Co-Investigator] CDC MInD Healthcare Network Covid-19 Supplemental Funding. (2020-2022) Total amount:$1.2M

Contact

Email: [firstname]-[lastname]@uiowa.edu

Office: 258 MH