About Me

Introduction

My name is Zhong Li, and I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science at Leiden University, affiliated with the EDA Lab. I completed my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Matthijs van Leeuwen (daily supervisor and promotor) and Prof. Dr. Thomas Bรคck (promotor). In 2024, I was a visiting PhD researcher at the DAML group, Technical University of Munich, supervised by Prof. Dr. Stephan Gรผnnemann.

๐Ÿ“˜ PhD Thesis: Trustworthy Anomaly Detection for Smart Manufacturing

Research Interests

My research lies broadly in Data Mining and Machine Learning, with a strong focus on Trustworthy AI.

Postdoctoral Research

I am currently working on trustworthy generative models, with a central belief:

When generative models can provide insights into the data they generate, they should also offer insights about themselves.

Key areas of interest include:

  • Flow Matching and Diffusion Models: What are they actually learning? How can we better extend these models for tabular and/or discrete data?
  • Understanding Unsupervised Learning: Why does self-supervised learning work (or not)? How can it be improved?

PhD Research

During my PhD, I focused on trustworthy anomaly detection, particularly for complex data like event sequences and graph-structured data in smart manufacturing contexts. My goals were to enhance:

  • Accuracy: Improve performance with high-dimensional, unstructured, multimodal data
  • Explainability: Make models more interpretable and human-friendly
  • Generalizability: Ensure robustness under data shifts, unknown hyperparameter settings, and adversarial noise

Recent News

Professional Service

  • Reviewer for journals:
    • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
    • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD / DAMI)
    • International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
    • IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI)
    • IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT)
    • IEEE Intelligent Systems
    • AI Communications
  • PC Member or Reviewer:
    • ECMLPKDD
    • KDD
    • ICLR

Contact

Office: BE 2.23, Gorlaeus Building, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC Leiden, The Netherlands
Email: z.li(at)liacs.leidenuniv.nl