Danai Koutra receives IBM Early Career Data Mining Research Award

Danai Koutra, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the IBM Early Career Data Mining Award by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Given to one individual annually, the award recognizes researchers who have made “outstanding, influential, and lasting contributions” to the data science field within 10 years of receiving their PhD.

Koutra has a record of influential research in the field of data science. Her work focuses on the development of principled, interpretable, and scalable methods for discerning and describing patterns in large-scale data. These patterns are identified by leveraging the inherent connections within the data, which are modeled as graphs and can represent anything from social networks to neural networks. Through her research, Koutra devises methods to summarize data at different levels, harnessing the scale, heterogeneity, and complexity of large-scale data, while also deriving meaningful insight from them.

Her recent projects include developing algorithms for multi-network tasks, such as brain graph classification for noninvasive psychiatric diagnosis; exploring graph neural networks (GNNs) in settings beyond homophily and introducing theoretically justified design choices that enhance model performance; as well as advancing the understanding of pitfalls when using GNNs and introducing better practices. Koutra’s work on these and related topics has seen tremendous success, including numerous publications in leading conferences and journals as well as several best paper awards. Notably, her 2013 paper on bipartite graph alignment received the 10-Year Highest Impact Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM).

Koutra’s excellent work in data mining and machine learning has earned her several honors. She has received an NSF CAREER Award, an ARO Young Investigator Award, the 2023 ICDM Tao Li Award, the 2020 SIGKDD Rising Star Award, and the 2016 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award. She was named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor in 2020 for her outstanding contributions to teaching and research. Prior to joining CSE, Koutra earned her PhD and MS in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015, after completing her undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens.