Short Bio

Songtao Lu is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University in 2018, under the supervision of Mingyi Hong and Zhengdao Wang. He then served as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities from 2018 to 2019, hosted by Mingyi Hong. After that, he joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as an AI Resident from 2019 to 2020. He subsequently became a Senior Research Scientist in the Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science Department at the same center in Yorktown Heights, NY, and was also affiliated with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Cambridge, MA.

He received the IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Honorable Mention Award in 2023, the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award in 2023, the IBM Entrepreneur Award in 2023, the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) in 2022, the Outstanding Paper Award at FL-NeurIPS in 2022, two IBM Research Accomplishment Awards, the ICML 2019 and AISTATS 2017 Travel Awards, the Graduate and Professional Student Senate Research Award at Iowa State University in 2017, and the Research Excellence Award from the Graduate College at Iowa State University in 2017. He is an IEEE Senior Member and an ACM member. He was selected for Stanford University's 2024 World's Top 2% Scientists List. He also served as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2024, 2023 and a Senior Area Chair for AAAI 2025, 2024. His primary interests are in the areas of optimization, machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence.