News

• June 2026: 11 WKU Computer Science undergraduates completed their theses under my direction. Graduate school offers they have received thus far include Bristol, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, UIUC, JHU, Michigan, NYU, UCSD, Sydney, Tianjin, Toronto, and counting. Well done, gang!

• May 2026: 2 regular papers accepted at ICML 2026 (one of the seven category "A" AI conferences recognized by the China Computer Federation), with 26.6% acceptance rate.

• Nov 2025: 2 papers (1 Oral and 1 Poster) accepted at AAAI 2026 (one of the seven category "A" AI conferences recognized by the China Computer Federation), with 17.6% acceptance rate.

• Oct 2025: Zhiwu hosted the 2025 Sino-Foreign University Library Annual Conference at Wenzhou-Kean University Library, attracting 140 attendees from 22 universities. See press release here.

• Jan 2025: Zhiwu has moved to Wenzhou, China as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of Computer Science at Wenzhou-Kean University. 

• October 2024: Our paper  "Nuclear Pore Segmentation in 3D FIB-SEM Images with Dynamic Cyclical Data Augmentation" has been accepted by the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, with an acceptance rate of 19.7%.

• October 2024: Participate in a panel discussion (my slides are here, paper published here) with a group of library & information school deans and program directors on "Emerging Topics, Challenges, and Strategies for Information Science Research" at the 2024 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting in Calgary, Canada, Oct 25-29, 2024. Other panelists include Profs. Jiangping Chen (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), June Abbas (Univ. of Oklahoma), Bei Yu (Syracuse), and Abebe Rorissa (Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville). 

• September 2024: The Librarian-in-the-Loop Deep Learning project has reached a milestone. Please check out our preliminary results here.  We start to explore image super-resolution methods, animal pose and movement tracking, and will work with more research labs on AI-assisted data analysis.

• July 2024: Our proposal, titled "LIBRAI: Liberating Libraries through Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program", has been awarded by IMLS LB21 program. Dr Yinlin Chen from Virginia Tech Libraries is the PI. I will serve as the co-PI from UCR.

• June 2024: Funded by NSF DS-PATH program, two groups of five students each, including Data Science graduate, undergraduate, and associate degree students from UCR, CSUSB, and local community colleges, joined my team on 10-week intern to label biomed images and Lidar data. The latter is a new collaboration with UCR CISL and Prof. Hang Qiu.

• June 2024: UCR selected the Riverside Artificial Intelligence ReSEarch (RAISE) Institute out of 16 proposals for its inaugural Campus Interdisciplinary Research Center (CIRC). I am one of the 85 members (about 10% of UCR’s total faculty) included in the RAISE Institute proposal.

• Mar 2024: NSF awards $498,553 to UCR ITS's proposal "Research Infrastructure: CC* Data Storage: Foundational Campus Research Storage for Digital Transformation", which I have helped draft and provided one of its science drivers.

• Mar 8, 2024: I gave a talk titled "AI Enhanced Segmentation of Very Large FIB-SEM Images For Cell Biology" at UCR's Data Science Seminar.

• Feb 2024: My lightning talk "Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom: An Organic Funding Model To Incubate Library Transformation", has been accepted for CNI’s Spring 2024 Membership Meeting. Watch the recorded video (with slides), 

• Feb 2024: Videos of my presentations on both IMLS funded projects: 1) Joint Professional Development Institute for Librarians and 2) AI assisted very large biomed image segmentation, have been released by CNI Pre-recorded Project Briefing, 2024 February edition.

• Jan 2024: My team at UCR Library has been selected to participate in the maDMSP pilot. See ARL news release here. 

• Dec 2023: My student Chongyu He successfully defended his MS thesis, "Deep Learning Approach for Cell Nuclear Pore Detection and Quantification over High Resolution 3D Data," at Virginia Tech. Chongyu is now a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Virginia.

• Nov 2023: I am selected as a fellow of the 2023-24 Association of Research Libraries Leadership Fellows Program.

• Sep 2023: Institute of Museum & Library Services  awarded $149,216  to my proposal "Curating Very Large Biomedical Image Datasets For Librarian-In-The-Loop Deep Learning" through the National Leadership Grant for Library (NLG-L) program. 

• Aug 2023: Institute of Museum & Library Services awarded $499,966 (with $321,903 additional cost share) to my proposal "Joint Professional Development Institute To Cultivate Collaborative Library Scholars" through its Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian (LB21) program 

• Aug 2023: Our paper "A Real-Time Processing and Visualization Framework for High-Volume Smart Infrastructure Data" has been published by Automation in Construction (IF=10.3, 2022 JIF Rank #2 out of 139, Q1, in Civil Engineering & 2022 JCI Rank #2 out of 89, Q1, in Construction & Building Technology).

• Jan 2023: My student Xinyue Wang successfully defended his PhD dissertation "Large Web Archive Collection Infrastructure and Services" at Virginia Tech. Xinyue now works at Yahoo! as a research scientist.

For details, please visit the Projects section.