Ninghao Liu

Timeline

1. 2014–2015

   Degrees from SCUT and Georgia Tech

   A B.S. in information engineering from South China University of Technology arrives in 2014, followed by an M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015.

2. 2016–2018

   A survey of interpretable machine learning

   A group presentation in 2016 of a paper on whether to trust machine learning models starts his interest in explainable AI. In 2018, he coauthors the survey "Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning" with Mengnan Du and Xia Hu, posted to arXiv in July 2018 and accepted by Communications of the ACM as a review article.

3. 2020–2021

   A Texas A&M PhD under Xia Hu

   He defends his dissertation in November 2020 and receives the PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2021, under the supervision of Xia Hu.

4. 2022

   An ICML Outstanding Paper

   G-Mixup, which he coauthors with Xiaotian Han, Zhimeng Jiang and Xia Hu, receives an Outstanding Paper Award at ICML 2022. The method augments graph data for graph classification by estimating a graphon from the graphs of each class, interpolating the graphons of different classes, and sampling synthetic graphs from the mixed graphons.

5. 2022–2023

   Assistant professor at Georgia

   As an assistant professor in the University of Georgia's School of Computing, he receives an NSF IIS Core grant, "Collaborative Research: III: Small: Graph-Oriented Usable Interpretation," as the UGA principal investigator in August 2022. In February 2023, he presents PromptRec to the UGA Department of Statistics, a prompt-learning framework that uses pre-trained language models to make recommendations when no user-item interaction history exists.

6. 2024

   An AMIA award and a GenAI center

   His work wins the Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA 2024. In October 2024, the UGA School of Computing names him, together with Distinguished Professor Tianming Liu, to a major role in building AI agents on multimodal large language models for a national GenAI center funded by a five-year, $10 million Institute of Education Sciences grant.

7. 2025

   UGA's first Google Research Scholar

   In June 2025, he becomes the University of Georgia's first Google Research Scholar Award recipient; the $60,000 award supports a project titled "Enhancing Medical Knowledge in Multimodal Foundation Models through Self-Synthesized Data." In July 2025, he receives, as principal investigator, an NSF grant for "Teacher-Involved Adaptive Learning with Explainable Generative AI," a three-year, $850,000 project with collaborators from UGA's College of Education.

8. Since October 2025

   Assistant professor at PolyU

   He joins the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as an assistant professor in October 2025. His research there spans explainable AI, large foundation models, graph mining, model fairness and recommender systems.