PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kun Zhang

Kun Zhang is a causal-learning researcher whose methods help machines find cause and effect in data, including the hidden causal variables behind images and text. He earned a Ph.D. at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki, and held research posts at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and at the University of Southern California before joining Carnegie Mellon's philosophy department. In 2022, the paper "On causal and anticausal learning", coauthored with Bernhard Schölkopf and four colleagues, received an ICML Test of Time Honorable Mention, and he co-founded and chaired the first Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR 2022). By 2024, he was a professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), where he directed the Center for Integrative AI. He is a professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, an affiliate faculty member in its machine learning department, and a visiting professor of machine learning at MBZUAI.

Timeline

  1. 2008–2010

    Causality challenge and UAI prizes

    He receives the best benchmark award of the second causality challenge in 2008. In 2010, he co-authors a best student paper at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).

  2. By 2019

    From Hong Kong to Carnegie Mellon

    He earns a Ph.D. at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and works as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. Before joining Carnegie Mellon, he is a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany and a lead scientist at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. In 2019, he is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Carnegie Mellon University.

  3. 2020–2022

    Prizes at CVPR and ICML

    In 2020, he co-authors a best-paper finalist at CVPR. In 2022, he receives an ICML Test of Time Honorable Mention with Bernhard Schölkopf, Dominik Janzing, Jonas Peters, Eleni Sgouritsa and Joris Mooij for "On causal and anticausal learning". He and Zeyu Tang also share the 2022 best paper award of the ICML workshop on New Frontiers in Adversarial Machine Learning.

  4. 2022

    CLeaR students win a NeurIPS competition

    In 2022, a team from his Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR) group at Carnegie Mellon works on the NeurIPS Causal Insights for Learning Paths in Education competition with causal-learn, the group's Python package for causal discovery. The team finishes first on the first three tasks and second on the final task.

  5. 2022–2024

    Chairing CLeaR, UAI and ICDM

    He co-founds the Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning and serves as general and program co-chair of its first edition, CLeaR 2022. He is a program co-chair of UAI 2022 and a general co-chair of UAI 2023, and he serves as a program chair of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining in 2024.

  6. 2022–2024

    Directing MBZUAI's Center for Integrative AI

    In 2022, he is an associate professor of machine learning at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), on leave from Carnegie Mellon. By 2024, he is a professor there, the acting chair of its machine learning department and the director of its Center for Integrative AI.

  7. 2025

    Leading Carnegie Mellon's causal AI team

    In 2025, he and Peter Spirtes lead an interdisciplinary Carnegie Mellon team that works on teaching AI systems to identify causes, with aims in health care, education and generative AI. His goal is an automated platform for scientific discovery that takes observed data or metadata as input and outputs plausible hypotheses.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Carnegie Mellon and MBZUAI

    He is a professor in the philosophy department at Carnegie Mellon University, an affiliate faculty member in its machine learning department, and a visiting professor of machine learning at MBZUAI. In July 2026, he gives a colloquium at Shenzhen University on causal representation learning and causal generative AI, and his research covers causal discovery from tabular data and causal representation learning from text, video and images.

Career

  1. Since 2022Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial IntelligenceAssociate Professor, Professor
  2. Since 2019Carnegie Mellon UniversityProfessor
  3. Until 2019Max Planck Institute for Intelligent SystemsSenior Research Scientist
  4. Until 2019University of Southern CaliforniaLead Scientist
  5. University of HelsinkiPostdoctoral Fellow

Education

  1. Chinese University of Hong KongPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Kun Zhang. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Kun Zhang yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. AIDRC Seminar Series - Kun Zhang | Technology Innovation Institute tii.ae. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Kun Zhang visits the DMIR lab for an academic talk (Guangdong University of Technology) dmir.gdut.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. ICML 2022 Awards icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. CMU-CLeaR Group cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Philosophy Graduate Students Win Top Honors in Competition cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Kun Zhang · AI/ML Seminar (UC Irvine) cml.ics.uci.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Liyuan Scholars Colloquium Session 178: Causal representation learning and causal generative AI math.szu.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Peacocks Eating Ice Cream: CMU Philosophers Teaching AI to Ask 'Why?' cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Kun Zhang (Carnegie Mellon University) andrew.cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.