Biography
Zhengzhang Chen is currently a senior research scientist at NEC Laboratories America. Previously, he served as a research assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Northwestern University, where he also completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Prof. Alok Choudhary. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University.
His research aims to advance real-world applications and systems through enhanced intelligence, increased security, and more effective decision-making capabilities. He has been primarily working on graph mining, anomaly detection, causal AI, AI security, graph neural networks, text mining, and their applications in computer security, IoT/OT systems, climate science, social media analytics, material science, bioinformatics, and finance, enabling machines to better understand real-world complex dynamic systems.
He has published over 80 peer-reviewed research papers in major academic venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS, KDD, ICLR, AAAI, WWW, and IJCAI. His work has been featured in various news media including NSF News, DOE ASCR Discovery, NHK TV News, The Conversation, and esciencenews. Additionally, his research has led to the filing of over 100 patents, with 41 issued.
News
- [05/2025] Our survey paper "Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey" got accepted by ACM Computing Surveys.
- [05/2025] Our paper "Beyond the Permutation Symmetry of Transformers: The Role of Rotation for Model Fusion" got accepted by ICML 2025 as spotlight (the top 2.6% of all submissions).
- [04/2025] Invited to serve as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025.
- [03/2025] Invited to serve as an SPC for CIKM 2025.
- [03/2025] Invited to serve as an Area Chair for ACML 2025.
- [02/2025] Our paper "MixLLM: Dynamic Routing in Mixed Large Language Models" got accepted by NAACL 2025 (acceptance rate: 22%).
- [01/2025] Invited to serve as an SPC for IJCAI 2025.
- [01/2025] Workshop proposal accepted! 🎉 Check out the The 2nd Workshop on Advances in Robust and Reliable Machine Learning (ARRML’25) at SDM 2025.
- [07/2024] Invited to serve as an SPC for AAAI 2025.
- [07/2024] Workshop proposal accepted! 🎉 Check out the The 4th International Workshop on Data-Centric AI at CIKM 2024.
- [06/2024] Invited to serve as an Area Chair for ACML 2024.
- [06/2024] Won NEC Business Contribution Award: In recognition of key contributions to root cause analysis.
- [06/2024] Released LEMMA-RCA datasets and root cause analysis benchmark codes.
- [05/2024] One paper got accepted by KDD 2024.
- [05/2024] Invited to serve as an SPC for WSDM 2025.
- [03/2024] Our LLM survey paper was cited by 2024 Economic Report of the President of the United States.
- [01/2024] Invited to serve as an Area Chair for KDD 2024.
- [01/2024] One paper got accepted by The Web Conference (WWW) 2024.
- [09/2023] One paper got accepted by NeurIPS 2023.
- [06/2023] Invited to serve as an SPC for AAAI 2024.
- [05/2023] Invited to serve as an SPC for WSDM 2024.
- [05/2023] Two papers got accepted by KDD 2023.