Short Bio

Dongxiao Zhu is currently a Professor at Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Zhu's recent research interests are in Trustworthy AI and Applications in health, urban, and social computing with emphasis on adversarial robustness, explainability and fairness. Dr. Zhu is the Founding Director of Wayne AI Research Initiative, Inaugural Director of Institute for AI and Data Science, and Director of Trustworthy AI Lab at Wayne State University. He has published 100+ peer-reviewed publications and served on program committees of flagship AI conferences (NuerIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, EMNLP, AMIA, MICCAI) and of premier scientific journals (Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Medical Physics, Transportation Research, Small, and BMC Genomics). Dr. Zhu's research has been supported by NSF, NIH and private agencies. Dr. Zhu's teaching interest lies in programming language, data structures and algorithms, machine learning and data science.

In addition to foundational AI research, Dr. Zhu also pursues use-inspired AI research in life, physical and social science domains. He is passionate about leveraging AI for science and social good. And his recent work in developing robust, fair and explainable AI algorithms and systems to ameliorate spatiotemporal mismatch between housing and employment, future of work, and reducing health disparities have been featured in Detroit PBS, WJR radio and Hour Detroit Magazine, just to name a few, manifesting his continuous efforts in achieving the sustainable development goals such as zero hunger, better cyber-social behaviors, good health and well-being, and reduced inequalities in socially vulnerable regions/groups. Dr. Zhu is also deeply engaged in AI education. As the program’s Founder and Inaugural Director, he led the efforts to launch Wayne State’s M.S. in AI (Algorithm & Software track), regularly teaches foundational AI courses, and actively leads initiatives to increase AI literacy among faculty and students, ensuring that the benefits of AI scholarship and practice extend across disciplines.

News

Nov 2025: I was invited to speak at AI in the Public Sector sponsored by Boston Consulting Group.
Nov 2025: I was invited to interview for "Making AI Work for the Public: An ALT Perspective".
Nov 2025: LLM unlearning paper first-authored by my student Xiangyu Zhou, titled "Not All Tokens Are Meant to Be Forgotten" accepted for an oral presentation at The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26).
Oct 2025: I am appointed as the inaugural Co-Director of the Institute for AI and Data Science at WSU.
Oct 2025: I offer a new course on Trustworthy AI for Large Language Model and Vision-Language Model in Winter 2026.
Oct 2025: I am invited to speak at MSU Research Foundation Data Science & AI Summit 2025.
Sept 2025: I serve on NSF CISE panel (X4 in 2024-2025).
Aug 2025: My use-inspired AI research project titled "VisionWay: Accessibility-aware Path Selection for Wayfinding" has been funded by NIH!
Aug 2025: My foundational AI research project titled "Collaborative Research: III: Medium: Advancing Large Language Model Unlearning: Foundations and Applications" has been funded by NSF!
Aug 2025: I am serving on NIH review panel on Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (X3).
July 2025: I am serving on the Senior Program Committee (Area Chair) for AAAI 2026.
July 2025: I am serving on DOE review panel.
July 2025: Two papers accepted by European Conference in AI (ECAI-25), first authored by my students Rafi Sultan and Saleh Zare Zade.
May 2025: I am serving as the Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025.
March 2025: Collaborative paper titled "Collective Consent: Who Needs to Consent to the Donation of Data Representing Multiple People?" accepted by The 27th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2025).
March 2025: Medical imaging research paper on "enhancing CT image segmentation accuracy through ensemble loss function optimization", first authored by my student Chengyin Li was accepted by the journal Medical Physics.
March 2025: Collaborative paper on mechanical evolution of metastatic cancer cells was accepted by the journal Small.
Feb 2025: The LLM healthcare paper (conversational risk assessment), first authored by my student Mohammad Amin Roshani was accepted by Journal of Medical Internet Research - AI (JAI).
Jan 2025: Serving as a meta-reviewer for 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2025).
Oct 2024: Two papers accepted by WACV 2025, first authored by my student Chengyin Li.
Sept 2024: I am part of Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program project supported by $5M Health Resources and Services Administration grant!
August 2024: I am co-organizing the 3rd Workshop on Adversarial Machine Learning Frontiers @ NeurIPS-24.
July 2024: Congratulations to Dr. Qiang Yao for completing his successful PhD journey and start his career as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at Oakland University! Dissertation: Designing for Reliability: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.
July 2024: Congratulations to Dr. Chengyin Li for completing his successful PhD journey and start his career as a staff scientist at Henry Ford Health! Dissertation: Novel Transformer Architectures for 3D Multi-modal and Multi-organ Medical Image Segmentation.
July 2024: The paper entitled "Fairness-aware Vision Transformer via Debiased Self-Attention" first authored by my student Qiang Yao has been accepted by ECCV-24.
June 2024: I am serving on a NIH study section again.
May 2024: I am excited to participate in NSF Workshop on Envisioning Open Research Resources for AI.
May 2024: I am serving on a NSF CISE panel again.
April 2024: Congratulations to Chengyin Li on winning the prestigious Michael E. Conrad Award!
April 2024: Our AI for mobility and future of work research was featured on Detroit PBS.
March 2024: The MS AI program I created in collaboration with ECE and ISE departments is ranked #20 in the nation by TechGuide.
March 2024: I am serving on a NIH study section.
Feb 2024: Our recent work learns to poison LLMs during instruction tuning!
Feb 2024: I am serving on a NSF CISE panel.
Jan 2024: Our paper titled: Benchmark and Neural Architecture for Conversational Entity Retrieval from a Knowledge Graph is accepted by ACM TheWebConf-24, accept rate is 806/4,028 = 20.2%.
Jan 2024: Our paper titled: Traumatic Data: Applying Trauma-Informed Design to Data Donation of Sexual Violence Experiences to Improve Sexual Risk Detection AI is accepted by ACM CHI-24, accept rate is 1,060/4,028 = 26.3%.
Dec 2023: I gave an invited talk at National Science Foundation, titled "Towards Trustworthy AGI in the Era of Foundation Models – Opportunities, Risks, and Vision”.
Dec 2023: Our paper titled: MFABA: A More Faithful and Accelerated Boundary-based Attribution Method for Deep Neural Networks is accepted by AAAI-24, accept rate is 2,342/12,100 = 23.75%.
Dec 2023: I serve as a meta-reviewer for AI ethics track at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-24).
Nov 2023: Our recent work on fine tuning Segment Anything Model (SAM) for automated mobility infrastructure segmentation is available on arxiv.
Oct 2023: Our recent work uncovers the vulnerabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) from a novel lens of Adversarial In-Context Learning!
Aug 2023: I serve as a meta-reviewer for Robustness & Trustworthiness track at the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24).
June 2023: The paper titled "FocalUNETR: A Focal Transformer for Boundary-aware Prostate Segmentation using CT Images" first authored by my student Chengyin Li has been accepted by MICCAI-23, accept rate is 740/2,250 = 32%.
May 2023: Congratulations to Yao Qiang on winning the prestigious Michael E. Conrad Award!
April 2023: I was recommended for the promotion to full professor, effective Aug. 17 2023!
April 2023: The paper entitled "Negative Flux Aggregation to Estimate Feature Attributions" first authored by my student Xin Li has been accepted by IJCAI-23, accept rate is 685/4,566=15%.
April 2023: Our position paper titled "ChatGPT- a promising generative AI tool and its implications on cancer care" published in Cancer.
April 2023: I am giving an invited talk on Enhancing Algorithmic Fairness in Deep Learning at Department of Computer Science and Engineering of University at Buffalo.
April 2023: I am served as a panelist on the workshop on Fairness in Machine Intelligence for Global Health 2023.
March 2023: I am co-organizing 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Adversarial Machine Learning (AdvML) at ICML-2023!
Feb 2023: I served as a topic editor for Evolution in Statistical Genetics and Methodology at Frontiers in Genetics journal.
Feb 2023: I served as a meta-reviewer for AI ethics track at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-23).
Jan 2023: I gave an invited talk on Enhancing Algorithmic Fairness in Deep Learning at Department of Statistics and Probability of Michigan State University.
Jan 2023: I created the new online MS Program in Computer Science with concentration on AI.
Dec 2022: I received a NIH R33 grant (MPI) in developing a chatbot to acquire social, clinical and molecular determinants for personalized on-device MIS-C risk assessment, total amount is $1,449,684.
Dec 2022: I received a NSF Convergence Accelerator grant (co-PI) in learning geospatial features and developing human-centered AI for enhancing mobility equity for persons with disabilities, total amount is $613,621.
Nov 2022: The paper entitled "Learning Compact Features via In-Training Representation Alignment" first authored by my student Xin Li has been accepted by AAAI-23, accept rate is 1,721/8,777=19.6%.
Nov 2022: I gave an invited talk on Empowering Explainable Machine Learning through the Lens of Adversarial Robustness and Fairness at Computer Science and Engineering Department of Michigan State University.
Sept 2022: Trustworthy AI paper titled "AttCAT: Explaining Transformers via Attentive Class Activation Tokens." first authored by my student Mr. Yao Qiang has been accepted by NuerIPS-22, accept rate is 2,665/10,411 = 25.6%.
Aug 2022: I received a NSF HCC grant (PI) in leveraging AI for better cyber-social behavior via enhancing trust in data donation from users, total amount is $600,000.
Aug 2022: I created the new Master program in AI (Algorithms and Systems Track) hosted by Computer Science department. Interested students please contact me for further info.
June 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Xin Li for completing his successful PhD journey! Dissertation: Adversarial Machine Learning for Advanced Medical Imaging Systems.
June 2022: My student Mr. Chengyin Li's first first-author machine learning paper on privacy-aware and resource-constraint EV charging recommendation algorithm titled "Coupling User Preference with External Rewards to Enable Driver-centered and Resource-aware EV Charging Recommendation" accepted by ECML-PKDD 2022, accept rate is 242/932 = 26%.
May 2022: I am giving a Keynote Speech at Adversarial Machine Learning towards Advanced Vision Systems (AMLAVS) workshop @ACCV-2022.
April 2022: Trustworthy AI paper titled "Counterfactual Interpolation Augmentation (CIA): A Unified Approach to Enhance Fairness and Explainability of DNN." first authored by my student Mr. Yao Qiang has been accepted by 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22), accept rate is 680/4535 = 15%.
April 2022: I am honored and pleased to be selected to receive the "College of Engineering Excellence in Research" Award. Thanks to the department of computer science and college of engineering for your support!
March 2022: One of the collaborative work on "Deep learning protocol for improved photoacoustic brain imaging" has been recognized as a top cited article in Journal of Biophotonics (Certificate).
March 2022: I am co-organizing 1st Workshop on New Frontiers in Adversarial Machine Learning (AdvML) at ICML-2022! Program focuses on new theory/algorithm/application stack of AdvML and Trustworthy ML (Poster). Submission deadline: May 23 2022.
March 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Deng Pan for completing his successful PhD journey! Dissertation: Interpretable Machine Learning and Applications.
Jan 2022: Announcements - two fully funded PhD student positions in machine learning research available in Fall 2022! Strong background in mathematics and programming are desirable. Contact me with CV, transcripts, and/or publications.
Dec 2021: New tenure-track faculty position available @ Wayne State CS - preferred qualification in machine learning and AI.
Nov 2021: I am giving an invited talk titled "Robust and Explainable Machine Learning Algorithms for Social Good" at Department of Computer and Data Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.