Tyler Derr
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Assistant Professor Network and Data Science (NDS) Lab Email: Tyler (dot) Derr (at) vanderbilt (dot) edu |
Bio
Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Teaching and Affiliate Faculty in the Data Science Institute, and Faculty Fellow in the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University. Before that, he received his PhD in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Jiliang Tang. He has published 50+ papers in highly ranked journals and top conference proceedings, with h-index 30 and i10-index 50 (Google Scholar).
Tyler directs the Network and Data Science (NDS) lab, which conducts research in the areas of data mining and machine learning, with emphasis on social network analysis, deep learning on graphs, and data science for social good with applications in drug discovery, education, political science, and autism research. He has mentored his PhD students to have received numerous honors and awards including Vanderbilt's C. F. Chen Best Paper Award in 2022 and Runner-Up Award in 2023, the sole recipient of Vanderbilt's Graduate Leadership Anchor Award for Research in 2023, Finalist in Vanderbilt's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition in 2023, Nvidia Academic Hardware Grant in 2022, 1st Place in Vanderbilt's AI Showcase in 2024, Vanderbilt's Outstanding Doctoral Student Award in 2024, DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, along with their works being selected among the top-10 Most Influential CIKM’22/WWW’23 Papers by Paper Digest. He is actively involved in top conferences in his field, both in terms of publishing and serving as an AC/SPC/PC member, while receiving recognition such as the Best Paper Award at GLFrontiers Workshop at NeurIPS’23, Best Student Poster Award at SDM’19, and 3 Best Reviewer Awards. He has contributed to the organization of numerous international conferences and workshops; specifically, conference organizing committees at CIKM, DSAA, KDD, SDM, and WSDM, while co-founding the Machine Learning on Graphs (MLoG) Workshop (with 5 iterations at ICDM and WSDM). Being passionate about sharing knowledge, he has delivered 4 tutorials on Graph Neural Networks at KDD’20, AAAI’21, SDM’24, and CIKM’24, along with given numerous invited talks, such as at the ACM Web Conference Knowledge Graph Day, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Core Universities AI Workshop held at Georgia Tech, Foundation Model Research Center at Tsinghua University, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MiS), etc. He serves as Associate Editor for 4 journals, e.g., Tsinghua Science and Technology and IEEE Transactions on Big Data. Tyler has received numerous prestigious awards and honors, such as the NSF CAREER Award (2023), NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award (2024), and being selected for the Visiting Faculty Research Program at AFRL/RI (2023). Additionally, he was honored with the Fall 2020 Teaching Innovation Award from the School of Engineering and the 2024 Provost Immersion Grant for Faculty at Vanderbilt University, highlighting his dedication to exceptional teaching and mentoring.
Research Interestsdata mining, machine learning, social network anlaysis, recommender systems, deep learning on graphs, responsible and trustworthy AI, and interdisciplinary social good applications (e.g., drug discovery, education, political science, and neurodiversity) [Open positions] Call for Papers
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Recent News (before 2024 can be seen here)
2025
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: (still currently deciding which PhD program)
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
2024
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