The School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) is welcoming a new faculty member this academic year. Chao Zhang will join CSE as an assistant professor in January 2019. He is one of 12 new tenure-track faculty members recently hired by the College of Computing.  

“It is my pleasure to announce that Chao Zhang will be joining the ranks of CSE faculty. His knowledge and focus in data mining and applied machine learning aligns well with our current research efforts and he will be a tremendous addition to the school as we further our reputation as the leading school for computational science,” said CSE Chair and Professor David Bader.

Zhang’s research is based on massive social sensing data sets. He uses social media analysis, text mining, spatiotemporal data mining, and graph mining to analyze and model human activities in the physical world.

He has published more than 30 papers in major conferences and journals and is the recipient of the ECML/PKDD best student paper runner-up award (2015) as well as the Chiang Chen Overseas Graduate Fellowship (2013). His work has been highlighted in the media and transferred to Microsoft and the U.S. Army Research Lab.

Zhang will join CSE after completing his Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is advised by Abel Bliss Professor Jiawei Han.