Kai Shu

Timeline

1. 2012–2015

   Degrees at Chongqing University

   He earns a Bachelor of Engineering in network engineering at Chongqing University in 2012 and a Master of Science in computer science and technology there in 2015.

2. 2015–2020

   A PhD in Huan Liu's lab

   In September 2015, he becomes a research assistant in the Data Mining and Machine Learning (DMML) Lab at Arizona State University, and he interns at Yahoo Research and Microsoft Research during his doctorate. He completes a PhD in computer science under Huan Liu in 2020 with the dissertation "Understanding Disinformation: Learning with Weak Social Supervision."

3. 2017–2018

   Fake news survey and FakeNewsNet

   In 2017, with Amy Sliva, Suhang Wang, Jiliang Tang and Huan Liu, he publishes "Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective" in ACM SIGKDD Explorations. In 2018, he and coauthors release FakeNewsNet, a data repository that pairs news content with social context and dynamic information for studying fake news.

4. 2019–2020

   dEFEND and a dissertation award

   He and Huan Liu publish the book Detecting Fake News on Social Media in July 2019. He presents dEFEND, an explainable fake news detection method, at the 2019 ACM SIGKDD conference; the model identifies and explains fake news in real-world Twitter datasets with an average of 85 percent accuracy. His fake news research earns the 2020 Dean's Dissertation Award from ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

5. 2020–2024

   Gladwin chair at Illinois Tech

   In 2020, he joins Illinois Institute of Technology as Gladwin Development Chair Assistant Professor of computer science, and he holds the post until he moves to Emory in 2024. At Illinois Tech, he extends his disinformation research toward attribution, characterization and mitigation.

6. 2024

   The TrustLLM benchmark

   In January 2024, he is a coauthor of TrustLLM, a study of trustworthiness in large language models. Its benchmark spans truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy and machine ethics, and the study evaluates 16 mainstream LLMs across more than 30 datasets.

7. 2024

   An NSF CAREER Award

   In 2024, he receives a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his research on reducing bias in AI algorithms. The project aims to keep AI fair under generalization, privacy and robustness challenges, with applications such as social media mining and health informatics.

8. Since 2024

   Associate professor at Emory

   He joins Emory University in 2024 and is an associate professor in its Department of Computer Science, working on machine learning, data mining and social computing. He receives the ACM SIGKDD 2026 Rising Star Award. In March 2026, IEEE Spectrum describes his team's tests with colleagues at Emory and Carnegie Mellon University, in which most language models give way within a few responses when users keep disagreeing with them.