Jian Kang
Address: 3011 Wegmans Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
Email: jian [dot] kang [at] rochester [dot] edu
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester (UR). I am also affiliated with the Goergen Institute of Data Science. Prior to joining UR, I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I am lucky to be advised by Dr. Hanghang Tong.
To prospective students: Unfortunately, I am not recruiting new students at University of Rochester in the coming admission cycle.
Research
My research aims to model and understand the interconnected world (primarily using graphs). It mainly investigates the following questions in three big themes:- Data: Where do the data come from? What is the optimal data for a learning task?
- Model: Can we trust the model outputs?
- Task: How to let a learning model solve complicated real-world tasks?
Education
- Ph.D. (Computer Science), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Aug. 2019 - Jul. 2023
- M.CS. (Computer Science), University of Virginia. Aug. 2015 - Dec. 2016
- B.Eng. (Telecommunications Engineering), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Sep. 2010 - Jun. 2014
Awards and Honors
- Outstanding Reviewer Awards (KDD 2025, LoG 2022, NeurIPS 2022, CIKM 2021, ICLR 2020)
- Rising Stars in Data Science, UChicago, 2022 [Link]
- Mavis Future Faculty Fellow, UIUC, 2022 [Link]
- University Nomination (Top 3) for 2022 Apple Scholars in AI/ML, 2021
- KDD 2020 Student Travel Award, 2020
- CIKM 2019 Student Travel Award, 2019
- Big Data 2018 Student Travel Award, 2018