Grand Valley State University faculty members Dr. Yong Zhuang and Dr. Haoyu Li recently represented the GVSU College of Computing at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), held in Washington, D.C. ICDM is one of the most prestigious venues in the field of data mining and machine learning. This year, GVSU faculty not only attended but also served in key leadership roles that contributed to the conference’s success.

After previously serving on the committee for IEEE Big Data 2024, Dr. Zhuang was invited to join the ICDM Organizing Committee and took on the role of Student Travel Award Co-Chair. He worked for months to prepare for the conference and coordinate support for students. Although an NSF proposal for student travel funding was delayed due to the federal government shutdown, the committee successfully secured alternative funding and awarded travel support to 25 students, ensuring wide student participation from a wide array of universities.

ICDM 2025, held November 12-15 in Washington, D.C., gathered more than 860 researchers, students, and industry professionals from around the world. ICDM featured cutting edge work in machine learning, deep learning, large-scale data systems, spatio-temporal analytics, graph mining, and emerging areas such as AI, multimodal data mining, and data driven reasoning. The conference covered an extensive range of topics, from algorithms and theory to high impact applications in science, engineering, health, and finance.

A highlight for GVSU was graduate student Nishan Khanal’s presentation at the AI4TS Workshop. He presented the team’s research titled “InfoST: An Information Theoretic Framework for Evaluating Spatio-Temporal Prediction,” marking his first time speaking at a major international conference. His confident delivery and thoughtful response during the Q&A session reflected both the strength of the work and its contribution to the broader data mining community.