Tyler Derr

5/2025: Our paper ‘‘BTS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tie Strength Prediction’’ is accepted at KDD2025

5/2025: Honored to be selected as one of the inaugural Vanderbilt CARE Fellows to work towards enhancing student well-being and fostering a more supportive campus environment.

5/2025: Preprint ‘‘Amplifying Your Social Media Presence: Personalized Influential Content Generation with LLMs’’

5/2025: Preprint ‘‘SimAug: Enhancing Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models for Dense and Balanced Data Augmentation’’

4/2025: Our paper Advancements in Ligand-Based Virtual Screening through the Synergistic Integration of Graph Neural Networks and Expert-Crafted Descriptors is accepted in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (JCIM)

4/2025: Honored to be selected as the sole recipient of Vanderbilt’s 2025 Career Catalyst Impact Award

3/2025: Xin (Allen) Wang successfully defended his MS thesis ‘‘Data-Centric AI for Small Molecule Drug Discovery’’ – congratulations! Next Position: PhD in Computational Biology & Biomedical Informatics at Yale University

3/2025: Xueqi Cheng successfully defended his MS thesis ‘‘Edge-Centric Network Analytics’’ – congratulations! Next Position: PhD in Computer Science at Florida State University

3/2025: Qinwen Ge successfully defended her MS thesis ‘‘Enhanced Brain Graph Construction in Neuroimaging: A Data-Centric AI Approach’’ Next Position: staying for her PhD in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University

3/2025: Yuying Zhao successfully defended her PhD dissertation ‘‘Learning Beyong Utility: Fairness, Explainability, and Diversity’’ – congratulations, Dr. Zhao! Next Position: Advanced AI Research Scientist Senior Manager at Accenture

3/2025 Our work SuperWater: Predicting Water Molecule Positions on Protein Structures by Generative AI was accepted and presented at NVIDIA GTC AI Conference

3/2025: Our demo paper Real-Time Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection System via Radar Detector Sensors is accepted at ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS2025)

2/2025: Our workshop Machine Learning on Graphs in the Era of Artificial General Intelligence is accepted at KDD2025

1/2025: Our paper Signed Network Dataset Repository: Extracting Signed Relations from Social Networks is accepted at IEEE ICC2025

1/2025: Our paper A Large-scale Training Paradigm for Graph Generative Models is accepted at ICLR2025

1/2025: Our paper ‘‘Demystifying the Power of Large Language Models in Graph Generation’’ is accepted at NAACL2025 Findings

12/2024: Honored to receive the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award for our project ‘‘Cyclic Peptide Design with NVIDIA's BioNeMo Platform’’

12/2024: PhD student Bo Ni's first paper since joining NDS ‘‘Towards Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Reasoning: An Uncertainty Aware Perspective’’ is accepted at AAAI2025

12/2024: BS student Leyao Wang received an Honorable Mention for the 2024-2025 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award

12/2024: Congratulations to the two teams from my course, Project in Data Centric-AI and Mining, who won 1st and 3rd place FortyAU Awards out of 44 teams in Vanderbilt's CS Immersion Showcase

112024: PhD student Yunchao (Lance) Liu successfully defended his PhD dissertation ‘‘Geometric Deep Learning in Drug Discovery’’ – congratulations, Dr. Liu! Next Position: Computational ScientistPostdoc at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

11/2024: Preprint ‘‘SuperWater: Predicting Water Molecule Positions on Protein Structures by Generative AI’’

11/2024: Preprint ‘‘Personalization of Large Language Models: A Survey’’

11/2024: Gave an invited talk ‘‘Data Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning’’ in the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University

10/2024: Preprint ‘‘A Comprehensive Analysis of Social Tie Strength: Definitions, Prediction Methods, and Future Directions’’

10/2024: Preprint ‘‘Large Language Model-based Augmentation for Imbalanced Node Classification on Text-Attributed Graphs’’

10/2024: Gave an invited keynote ‘‘Demystifying the Node-Level Link Prediction Variability of Graph Neural Networks’’ at the Online and Adaptive Recommender Systems (OARS) Workshop at CIKM2024

10/2024: Gave an invited talk ‘‘Ethical AI in Recommender Systems: Fairness, Diversity, and Explainability’’ at the Knowledge Graphs for Responsible AI (KG-STAR) Workshop at CIKM2024

10/2024: We presented our tutorial on Data Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning at CIKM2024

10/2024: Our paper ‘‘Edge Classification on Graphs: New Directions in Topological Imbalance’’ is accepted at WSDM2025

10/2024: Gave an invited talk ‘‘Demystifying the Node-Level Link Prediction Variability of Graph Neural Networks’’ in the Vanderbilt Graph Theory and Combinatorics Seminar

10/2024: Preprint ‘‘Towards Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Reasoning: An Uncertainty Aware Perspective’’

9/2024: Our paper WelQrate: Defining the Gold Standard in Small Molecule Drug Discovery Benchmarking is accepted at NeurIPS2024

9/2024: Our paper FT-AED: Benchmark Dataset for Early Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection is accepted at NeurIPS2024

9/2024: Our paper Robust Graph Neural Networks via Unbiased Aggregation is accepted at NeurIPS2024

9/2024: PhD student Anne Tumlin's first paper since joining NDS ‘‘FairNNV: The Neural Network Verification Tool For Certifying Fairness’’ is accepted at ACM Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF2024)

8/2024: Our paper ‘‘A Survey on Privacy in Graph Neural Networks: Attacks, Preservation, and Applications’’ is accepted at IEEE TKDE

8/2024: Invited to serve as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)

8/2024: Gave an invited keynote ‘‘Ethical AI in Recommender Systems: Fairness, Diversity, and Explainability’’ at the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Methods and Applications (EAI-KDD) Workshop at KDD2024

8/2024: Preprint ‘‘A Survey of Mamba’’

8/2024: Invited to serve as Doctoral Forum Chair for SDM2025

8/2024: Gave an invited talk ‘‘Data Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning’’ in the School of Data Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen in their Discover CUHK-Shenzhen-ZJU Elite Students Summer Camp

8/2024: Visited The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)

7/2024: Our paper ‘‘Augmenting Textual Generation via Topology Aware Retrieval’’ is accepted at CIKM2024

7/2024: Taught an invited seminar series on Social Network Analysis at Beijing Jiaotong University

7/2024: Our tutorial ‘‘Data-Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning’’ is accepted at CIKM2024

7/2024: Our paper ‘‘EDGE-UP: Enhanced Dynamic GNN Ensemble for Unfollow Prediction in Online Social Networks’’ is accepted at ASONAM2024

6/2024: Our dataset and interactive visualization for early freeway traffic anomalous event detection (FT-AED) is now available (link), which is the first large-scale lane-level freeway traffic dataset for anomaly detection

6/2024: Preprint ‘‘FT-AED: Benchmark Dataset for Early Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection’’

6/2024: Preprint ‘‘Edge Classification on Graphs: New Directions in Topological Imbalance’’

6/2024: Awarded NSF grant to support student travel for US-based students to attend KDD2024

6/2024: Our LGGM Text2Graph Generation demo is now live, which is the first large graph generative model that supports generating graphs from textual descriptions

6/2024: Preprint ‘‘Large Graph Generative Models’’

5/2024: Preprint ‘‘Augmenting Textual Generation via Topology Aware Retrieval’’

5/2024: Invited to serve as Student Travel Chair for WSDM2025

4/2024: PhD student Yunchao (Lance) Liu's team won 1st place in the AI Showcase at VU Data Science Institute presenting the project DiffWater

4/2024: We presented out tutorial on Data Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning at SDM2024

4/2024: PhD student Yu Wang received the Best Doctoral Forum Poster Runner-Up award at SDM2024

4/2024: PhD student Anne Tumlin was awarded the Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellowship!

4/2024: Our paper ‘‘Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey’’ is accepted at ACM TIST

3/2024: MS student Catherine Yang successfully defended her MS thesis ‘‘An Analysis of Local Neighborhood-based Paradoxes in Signed Social Networks’’ – congratulations! Next Position: Software Engineer at Microsoft

3/2024: PhD student Yu Wang was awarded Vanderbilt's Outstanding Doctoral Student Award (one of three for the whole university)

3/2023: Invited to serve as Student Travel Chair for CIKM2024

3/2024: PhD student Yu Wang will be joining University of Oregon as a Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computer Science starting in Fall’24 - congratulations, Prof. Wang!

2/2024: Congratulations to Laura Wang who was selected for the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program (VUSRP) for her proposed research in the NDS Lab

2/2024: Our paper ‘‘Knowledge Graph-based Session Recommendation with Session-Adaptive Propagation’’ in collaboration with The Home Depot is accepted at WWW2024

1/2024: Our paper ‘‘Can One Embedding Fit All? A Multi-Interest Learning Paradigm Towards Improving User Interest Diversity Fairness’’ in collaboration with Visa Research is accepted at WWW2024

1/2024: Gave an invited talk ‘‘Network Science for Social Good’’ in the Frist Center Salon Series

1/2024: Our paper A Topological Perspective on Demystifying GNN-Based Link Prediction Performance in collaboration with Snap Inc. is accepted at ICLR2024