William Hsu

William Hsu is a Professor of Computer Science at Kansas State University's College of Engineering, where he has been a faculty member since 1999. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and previously received dual master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences from Johns Hopkins University (1993). Hsu serves as the Associate Director of Graduate Programs and directs the Laboratory for Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), focusing on applied AI, machine learning, and knowledge-based software engineering.

• Education:
  • Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1998)
  • M.S., Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (1993)
  • B.S., Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences (double major), Johns Hopkins University (1993)

Research Interests
His research spans machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, and data science, with applications to AI methods for spatial informatics, social informatics, cybersecurity, computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), robotics, and AI safety/ethics. Key focus areas include deep learning for topic/event tracking, anomaly detection, reinforcement learning generalization, and heterogeneous information networks.

Professional Affiliations

• Lifetime member: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, 2016), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI, 2017), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM, 2018)
• Member: Linguistic Society of America (2020), Society of Women Engineers (2021)

Teaching & Leadership
Hsu has taught courses like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Engineering since 2000. He advises the K-State ACM Special Interest Group in AI and has chaired workshops at IJCAI, AAAI, and KDD. He has graduated 8 doctoral students and over 70 master’s students.