Tianlong Chen

Tianlong Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he established the UNITES Lab (University of North Carolina, AI Trustworthiness, Efficiency, and for Science Group). He joined UNC in Fall 2024 after completing his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (2023) and serving as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT (CSAIL), Harvard University (BMI), and the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard.

His research focuses on building accurate, trustworthy, and efficient machine learning systems, with emphasis on:

• Sparsity and model compression techniques
• Robustness against adversarial challenges
• Learning-to-optimize methodologies
• Graph representation learning
• Diffusion models and generative AI
• Quantum computing applications
• Bioengineering and healthcare AI solutions

His publications demonstrate strong trends in large language model optimization, efficient multimodal systems, and trustworthy AI frameworks, with frequent appearances at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICLR).

Significant scientific honors include:

• IBM and Adobe Ph.D. Fellowships
• Best Paper Award at Learning on Graphs Conference 2022
• AdvML Rising Star (2023)
• Amazon Research Award (2024)
• Two UNC Accelerating AI Awards (2025)
• NAIRR Pilot Award (2025)

He leads 19+ advisees in the UNITES Lab and has secured research funding from Cisco, Amazon, and institutional grants. Current projects explore sparsity-aware architectures, LLM alignment, and efficient multimodal learning systems.