Tong Zhao, a graduate student in computer science and engineering, has received a 2020 Snap Research fellowship. These fellowships honor students who had a positive impact in research and product development during their internships at Snap Inc.
Zhao served as an intern with Snap Research’s computational social science team in 2020. His responsibilities included leading a data augmentation project focused on enhancing the data for graph learning in graph neural networks.
Zhao was recognized for his work in graph machine learning and graph mining, computational behavior modeling, and anomaly detection. He is developing advanced graph machine learning methods to solve unique challenges in graph anomaly detection, such as the lack of annotated labels or data. The work will be published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) during the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in February 2021.
“Tong’s work with Snap Research to enhance intelligent systems shows that the systems become more effective in the decision-making process if they learn to select or augment the data at the same time,” said Zhao’s adviser Meng Jiang, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
“His work and his thesis are among the earliest to explore the possibilities of graph data augmentation for artificial intelligence.”
— Nina Welding, College of Engineering