Zhe Jiang Homepage

Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab

Our mission is to design effective, efficient, and trustworthy AI systems inspired by unique challenges from interdisciplinary applications. Our vision is that future AI research requires the convergence of multiple disciplines because real-world problems are so complex. We value both technical innovations in ML methodologies (AI foundations) and tool deployment that solves real problems for society (interdisciplinary applications).

AI Foundations

Generalize AI to New Modality (Spatiotemporal, 3D Geometry, Graphs/Hypergraphs)

Hierarchical Spatial Transformer figure
A Hierarchical Spatial Transformer for Massive Point Samples in Continuous Space (NeurIPS'23)

Multi-resolution representation via quad-tree hierarchy and efficient spatial attention; uncertainty branch for confidence under feature noise and point sparsity.

XTSFormer illustration
XTSFormer: Cross-Temporal-Scale Transformer for Irregular-Time Event Prediction (AAAI'25)

Feature-based Cycle-aware Time Positional Encoding (FCPE), hierarchical multi-scale temporal attention for irregularly timed clinical events.

CurvaNet
CurvaNet: Directional Curvature for 3D Shape Analysis (KDD'20)

Integrates differential geometry with graph neural networks (GNNs); U-Net-like mesh pooling/unpooling to learn direction-sensitive 3D features.

Physical AI and World Model

Terrain-aware flood mapping
Terrain-aware Spatial ML for Flood Inundation (KDD'18–'19, SDM'23, TKDE, TIST)

Physics-guided hidden Markv tree (forest) model for flood mapping on Earth imagery and 3D terrains, also extended with CNN/GNN co-training via variational EM.

AI Surrogate for coastal circulation
AI Surrogate for Coastal Circulation (IPDPS'25, ICML'25)

4D Swin-based surrogate for estuary tidal wave propagation (hindcast + up to 12-day forecast), extended to decade-long multi-process simulation.

Trustworthy and Reliable AI

UQ taxonomy
Uncertainty Quantification Survey (arXiv)

Systematic taxonomy for data vs. model uncertainty; summarizes advantages and disadvantages across methods; identifies future research directions.

Geo-knowledge infused learning
Geo-Knowledge-Grounded Spatial Deep Learning (GIS'23, AAAI'24)

Neuro-symbolic grounding with spatial knowledge base; trains with inferred label uncertainty.

Benchmarking and Datasets

CoastalBench
CoastalBench (ICML'25)

Decade-long ~100 m coastal 3D mesh (~6M cells) with core oceanographic variables + external forcings to benchmark high-resolution coastal simulation models.

DecoyDB
DecoyDB (NeurIPS'25)

Structure-aware dataset for self-supervised GCL on protein-ligand binding; high-resolution ground-truth complexes & diverse computational decoys.

Interdisciplinary Applications