Jian Kang

Jian Kang is an Assistant Professor in the Statistics and Data Science and Computer Science departments at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). His research focuses on foundational problems in machine learning, with particular emphasis on understanding and improving how data influences modern AI models. His work explores data attribution methods that quantify the contribution of individual data points, data distillation techniques for identifying small but high-quality training subsets, and trustworthy machine learning topics such as robustness, uncertainty estimation, interpretability, and fairness. He is also interested in rethinking model evaluation in the era of large-scale foundation models, aiming to better understand what capabilities models truly possess beyond benchmark performance. In addition, his research extends to AI+X applications that apply machine learning to challenging real-world and scientific problems. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2023 under the supervision of Hanghang Tong. He has received recognitions such as Rising Stars in Data Science and Mavis Future Faculty Fellow, and he serves as an associate editor for ACM Computing Surveys as well as an area chair or senior program committee member for major conferences including ICML, NeurIPS, and AAAI.