Recently, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) officially announced its list of 2025 ACM Distinguished Members. Professor Zhang Rui from the School of Computer Science and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) was selected in recognition of his outstanding contributions to data-centric systems and AI-driven big data applications.
Professor Zhang Rui. [Photo/HUST]
The ACM is the world's most influential professional organization in the field of computing. The Distinguished Member title honors individuals who have demonstrated significant professional achievements, with recipients accounting for no more than 10 percent of ACM’s global membership. In 2025, a total of 61 researchers worldwide were elected, among whom only six scholars are from universities in China.
Professor Zhang received his bachelor's degree in Precision Instruments from Tsinghua University in 2001 and earned his PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2006. He joined HUST in 2025, after previously serving as a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research interests span artificial intelligence, including large language models, information retrieval, multimodal learning, recommender systems, knowledge graphs, and dialogue systems, as well as big data technologies, such as databases, indexing and query processing, data mining, graph data management, and spatio-temporal data analytics.
Professor Zhang has published over 200 papers in leading international journals and top-tier conferences, including more than 120 CCF Class A papers. His work has received over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. A number of his innovations have been widely adopted by major global technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Huawei, Amazon, and AT&T.
He has received numerous prestigious international awards, including the Google Faculty Research Award in Structured Data (2017)--with only three recipients worldwide in that field that year--the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, the Best Student Paper Award at ACM’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2016), and a Best Paper Nomination at the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (2024). In addition, Professor Zhang has served as conference chair or organizer for 12 major international conferences in artificial intelligence and big data, and currently holds the position of associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC).
Source: VOC
