Short Biography
Dongxiao Zhu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University, where he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research centers on Trustworthy AI and Applications — advancing adversarial robustness, explainability, and fairness of deep learning systems for use in health, urban, and social computing.
Dr. Zhu is the Founding Director of the Wayne AI Research Initiative, Inaugural Director of the Institute for AI and Data Science, and Director of the Trustworthy AI Lab at Wayne State University. He has authored 100+ peer-reviewed publications and serves on program committees of flagship venues including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, EMNLP, AMIA, and MICCAI. His research has been funded by NSF, NIH, and private agencies.
In addition to foundational AI research, Dr. Zhu pursues use-inspired AI research addressing pressing human-centered challenges — including mobility equity, health disparities, and future of work — with work featured in Detroit PBS, WJR Radio, and Hour Detroit Magazine. He is also deeply committed to AI education, having founded Wayne State's M.S. in AI program, now ranked #20 nationally.
Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Wayne State University
News
- Apr 2026 Grant Project "Aligning Large Reasoning Models via Safety-aware Post-Training" awarded by National AI Research Resources (NAIRR), led by NSF.
- Apr 2026 ServiceServing as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
- Mar 2026 TalkInvited talk on "Generative AI Interplay with Humanity and Society" at WSU's Humanity Symposium.
- Feb 2026 Paper"WalkGPT: Grounded Vision–Language Conversation with Depth-Aware Segmentation for Pedestrian Navigation" (Rafi Ibn Sultan et al.) accepted at CVPR 2026.
- Feb 2026 TalkPublic lecture on AI Literacy at Royal Oak Public Library.
- Feb 2026 Paper"FluenceFormer: Transformer-Driven Multi-Beam Fluence Map Regression for Radiotherapy Planning" (Ujunwa Mgboh et al.) accepted at MIDL 2026.
- Jan 2026 Paper"Attention Smoothing is All You Need for Unlearning" (Saleh Zare Zade et al.) accepted at ICLR 2026.
- Dec 2025 ServiceServing on the Senior Program Committee for IJCAI-ECAI 2026.
- Nov 2025 TalkInvited speaker at AI in the Public Sector event sponsored by Boston Consulting Group.
- Nov 2025 Paper"Not All Tokens Are Meant to Be Forgotten" (Xiangyu Zhou et al.) accepted as an Oral at AAAI 2026.
- Oct 2025 NewsAppointed inaugural Director of the Institute for AI and Data Science at Wayne State University.
- Aug 2025 GrantNIH funds "VisionWay: Accessibility-aware Path Selection for Wayfinding."
- Aug 2025 GrantNSF funds "Collaborative Research: III: Medium: Advancing Large Language Model Unlearning: Foundations and Applications."
- Jul 2025 PaperTwo papers accepted at ECAI 2025, first-authored by students Rafi Sultan and Saleh Zare Zade.
- Jul 2025 ServiceServing as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025.
- Apr 2024 MediaAI for mobility and future of work research featured on Detroit PBS.
- Mar 2024 AwardMS AI program co-created with ECE and ISE departments ranked #20 nationally by TechGuide.
- Apr 2022 AwardRecipient of the College of Engineering Excellence in Research Award, Wayne State University.