Zhiqian Chen earns Ph.D. in computer science, will teach in Fall

Zhiqian (Danny) Chen earned a Ph.D. in computer science this summer and is joining the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Mississippi State University as a tenure track assistant professor. 

Chen’s research interests are graph mining, urban computing, and network science and the title of his dissertation is “Graph Neural Networks: Techniques and Applications.” His advisor was Chang-Tien Lu.

Among the papers he presented while a graduate student are: “Learning to Fuse Music Genres with Generative Adversarial Dual Learning” at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in New Orleans, Louisiana and “Rational Neural Networks for Approximating Jump Discontinuities of the Graph Convolution Operator” at ICDM 2018 in Singapore. 

“Effective information analysis generally boils down to the geometry of the data represented by a graph,” said Chen. Typical applications include social networks, transportation networks, spread of epidemic diseases, neuronal networks, biological regulatory networks, telecommunication networks, and knowledge graphs, defined over non-Euclidean graph domains.

Chen holds a bachelor’s degree in software engineering and Japanese from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, and a master’s degree in software engineering from Peking University, China.