Tyler Derr

2025

• 11/2025: Our paper SAVE-TAG: Semantic-Aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs is accepted at KDD2026

• 11/2025: Honored to receive Vanderbilt's Provost Immersion Grant for Faculty to support our work ‘‘Building Trustworthy AI: Ensuring Privacy and Security in Language Models’’

• 11/2025: Our paper ‘‘Graph2Video: Leveraging Video Models to Model Dynamic Graph Evolution’’ is accepted at AAAI2026

• 11/2025: Our paper ‘‘SuperWater as a Generative AI Framework to Predict Water Molecule Positions on Protein Structures’’ is accepted at Communications Chemistry

• 10/2025: Preprint Scaffold-Aware Generative Augmentation and Reranking for Enhanced Virtual Screening

• 10/2025: Invited to serve as a member of the IEEE Task Force on Learning for Graphs

• 10/2025: Recognized on the 2025 Stanford/Elsevier list of the World's Top 2% Scientists

• 9/2025: Preprint Large Language Models for Conversational User Simulation: A Comprehensive Survey

• 8/2025: Preprint Mitigating Distribution Shift in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification via Function Metadata and LLM Embeddings

• 8/2025: Preprint Defining and Benchmarking a Data-Centric Design Space for Brain Graph Construction

• 8/2025: Preprint Inverse-LLaVA: Eliminating Alignment Pre-training Through Text-to-Vision Mapping

• 8/2025: Invited to serve as Editorial Board Member for ACM AI Letters, a newly launched, first-of-its-kind rapid-publication journal for impactful AI reserach – check it out here

• 8/2025: Honored to receive a Young Investigator Best Paper Award (3rd) from KDD’25 Health Day for my Blue Sky paper ‘‘Referral Required: When AI Blocks Access to Human Doctors’’

• 8/2025: Former PhD Yu Wang receives 2025 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

• 8/2025: Preprint ‘‘Towards Bridging Review Sparsity in Recommendation with Textual Edge Graph Representation’’

• 8/2025: Honored to serve as Senator in Vanderbilt's Faculty Senate as a School of Engineering representative

• 7/2025: Honored to receive an NSF grant for the project Towards Well-Rounded Graph Retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

• 7/2025: Our paper ‘‘Explanation Difference: Bridging Procedural and Distributional Fairness’’ is accepted at AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES)

• 6/2025: Invited to give a KDD’25 Health Day Blue Sky Spotlight talk ‘‘Referral Required: When AI Blocks Access to Human Doctors’’

• 6/2025: Recognized as a 2024 Top Scholar by ScholarGPS, ranking in the top 0.5% worldwide overall and ranked top 50 in Data Mining over the past five years

• 6/2025: Our paper ‘‘Edges Matter: An Analysis of Graph Time-Series Representations for Temporal Networks’’ is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE)

• 5/2025: Our paper ‘‘Personalization of Large Language Models: A Survey’’ is accepted in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

• 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

• 4/2025: Awarded NSF grant to support student travel for US-based students to attend SDM2025

• 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