Congratulations to Dr. Xi Zhang!

Nov 19, 2024. MLRG member Xi Zhang successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, earning her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Zhang delivered an excellent defense and passed with flying colors.

Zhang’s dissertation, titled “Theoretical Advancements in Hawkes Processes and Their Practical Applications,” studied mathematical models for events that unfold over time and can trigger additional events, such as earthquake aftershocks, financial activity, traffic accidents, and the spread of information on social media. Her work advanced Hawkes processes, a major class of models for these self-exciting event patterns, by improving how such models can be validated when real-world data are incomplete, developing a flexible kernel-based method for estimating how events influence future events, and deriving new tools for predicting future event counts from partially observed activity. These contributions make Hawkes process models more reliable, interpretable, and useful for analyzing and forecasting cascading behavior in real-world systems.

This milestone marks the culmination of years of dedicated doctoral work and reflects Zhang’s many contributions to MLRG’s research on machine learning methods for modeling, predicting, and understanding information cascades.

Congratulations, Dr. Zhang, on this outstanding achievement!