Jundong Li, a University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor who specializes in data mining and machine learning, has been honored with the Early Career Research Award at the 2023 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
In its 27th year, the conference — known as PAKDD — is one of the longest-running and leading international forums for researchers and industry practitioners to share ideas, original research results and practical development experiences across knowledge discovery and data mining fields.
The Early Career Research Award recognizes excellence and promise in the awardee's body of work over the first 10 years after receiving the Ph.D. degree.
Li received his Ph.D. in computer science at Arizona State University in 2019. His Ph.D. dissertation research focused on algorithms to make predictive models more accurate and productive.
He also holds a Master of Science in computer science from the University of Alberta, Canada, and a Bachelor of Engineering in software engineering from Zhejiang University in China.
Li joined UVA Engineering's Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor in the fall of 2019, with joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and School of Data Science.
His recent research focus areas include causal inference — or finding cause-and-effect relationships in huge data sets — and algorithmic fairness. The latter aims to open the “black box” of algorithms that affect people's lives — such as computer models that evaluate bank loan applications — to ensure equal treatment across demographics.His work has been recognized with several prestigious honors and funding awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award; the Best Research Paper Award at SIGKDD 2022, last year's conference of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining; and J.P. Morgan Chase Faculty Research Awards, among others.
Li has authored or co-authored more than 80 papers, with more than 8,750 citations.