KZ Kai Zheng
Portrait of Kevin Kai Zheng

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Kevin Kai Zheng

郑 凯

Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Spatio-temporal data management for intelligent, data-driven systems.

Professor Kevin Kai Zheng works on spatio-temporal databases, trajectory computing, spatial crowdsourcing, recommendation systems, AI4DB, and data-driven applications.

  • Spatio-temporal Databases
  • Trajectory Computing
  • AI4DB
  • Spatial Crowdsourcing
  • Recommendation Systems
  • Autonomous Driving
Email
zhengkai@uestc.edu.cn
Address
Qingshuihe Campus: No.2006, Xiyuan Ave, West Hi-Tech Zone, Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R.China
办公地址
电子科技大学清水河校区主楼 B1-406
300+ Peer-reviewed papers
22000+ Google Scholar citations
75 H-index
IEEE Senior Member
CCF Distinguished Member

Biography

Dr. Kai Zheng is a professor with University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). He received Ph.D. degree of Computer Science from The University of Queensland (UQ) (advised by Prof Xiaofang Zhou). Before joining UESTC, he has worked as Research Fellow (2012 - 2013) and ARC DECRA (Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award) Fellow (2014 - 2016) with the Data and Knowledge Engineering Group of UQ. His research interests include spatio-temporal databases, trajectory computing, spatial crowdsourcing, recommendation systems, as well as many other data-driven applications. He received a few best paper awards on international conferences including ICDE 2019 and 2015, APWeb-Waim 2017, WISE 2017. He served the General co-Chair of DASFAA 2017, Program co-Chair of APWeb 2016, and Program Committee for over 20 top-tier conferences including SIGMOD, PVLDB, ICDE, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, WWW, etc. He is the associate editor of IEEE TKDE, WWW Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases (DPD) and Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE). He has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier conferences and journals in the area of Big Data Management, receiving over 22000 citations with H-index of 75 (according to Google Scholar). He is a senior member of IEEE and a distinguished member of CCF.

What's New

Updates

Recent News

  • 16/06/2026 -- One paper has been accepted by SIGMOD 2027.
  • 26/05/2026 -- One paper has been accepted by VLDB 2026 (Industry track).
  • 16/05/2026 -- One paper has been accepted by SIGKDD 2026.
  • 10/03/2026 -- One paper has been accepted by VLDB Journal.
  • 23/02/2026 -- Three papers have been accepted by ICDE 2026.
  • 16/02/2026 -- Three papers have been accepted by WWW 2026.

Research Focus

  • Big data management with emphasis on spatial and temporal data.
  • Trajectory analytics and efficient search for mobility systems.
  • AI-assisted databases, query optimization, and data-driven applications.
  • Spatial crowdsourcing and recommendation in dynamic environments.

Selected Publications

Journals & Conferences

Selected Journal Papers (* Corresponding author)

  1. [VLDBJ] Xu Chen, Ximu Zeng, Yuze Wang, Zibo Liang, Kai Zeng, Han Su, Kai Zheng*: LEON+: Towards Robust ML-aided Query Optimization. VLDB Journal (Accepted in March 2026)
  2. [TKDE] Yuyang Xia, Shuncheng Liu, Xu Chen, Yan Zhao, Han Su, Xiaofang Zhou, Kai Zheng*: Energy-Efficient Velocity Control with State Augmentation for Autonomous Vehicles. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted in Feb 2026)
  3. [TKDE] Yuyang Xia, Shuncheng Liu, Yan Zhao, Han Su, Xiaofang Zhou, Kai Zheng*: Impact-aware Maneuver Decision with Driving Style Tuning for Autonomous Vehicle. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted in Feb 2026)
  4. [TKDE] Yuchen Fang, Hao Miao, Yuxuan Liang, Liwei Deng, Yue Cui, Ximu Zeng, Yuyang Xia, Yan Zhao, Torben Bach Pedersen, Christian S. Jensen, Xiaofang Zhou, Kai Zheng*: Unraveling Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models via the Pipeline Lens: A Comprehensive Review. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted in Dec 2025)
  5. [TKDE] Hao Miao, Ziqiao Liu, Yan Zhao, Chenxi Liu, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang, Kai Zheng, Huan Li, Christian S. Jensen: LightTR+:A Lightweight Incremental Frameworkfor Federated Trajectory Recovery. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted in Nov 2025)
  6. [TKDE] Rongwei Xu, Guanfeng Liu, Yan Wang, Xuyun Zhang, Kai Zheng, Xiaofang Zhou: Intent-Based Trust Evaluation. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted in Oct 2025)
  7. [TKDE] Hao Miao, Yan Zhao, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang, Kai Zheng, Christian S. Jensen: Spatio-Temporal Prediction on Streaming Data: A Unified Federated Continuous Learning Framework. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 37(4): 2126-2140 (2025)
  8. [TKDE] Yunyao Cheng, Chenjuan Guo, Kaixuan Chen, Kai Zhao, Bin Yang, Jiandong Xie, Christian S. Jensen, Feiteng Huang, Kai Zheng: Gaussian Process Latent Variable Modeling for Few-Shot Time Series Forecasting. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 37(8): 4604-4619 (2025)
  9. [TKDE] Yan Zhao, Xuanlei Chen, Guanyu Ye, Fangda Guo, Xiaofang Zhou, Kai Zheng*: Task Allocation in Spatial Crowdsourcing: An Efficient Geographic Partition Framework. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted in Mar 2024)
  10. [TKDE] Shuncheng Liu, Xu Chen, Yan Zhao, Han Su, Xiaofang Zhou, Kai Zheng*: Comfort-Aware Lane Change Planning With Exit Strategy for Autonomous Vehicle. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 36(7): 2927-2941 (2024)

Selected Conference Papers (* Corresponding author)

  1. [SIGMOD] Zibo Liang, Quanqing Xu, Xu Chen, Junming Chen, Yuyang Xia, Kai Zheng*: E-LQO: A Comprehensive Energy Evaluation Framework for Learned Query Optimization: [Experiments & Analysis]. SIGMOD 2027, Huntington Beach, USA
  2. [VLDB] Xu Chen, Junmin Chen, Shuncheng Liu, Yuyang Xia, Zibo Liang, Xiaoming Qin, Kai Zeng,Han Su, Kai Zheng*: DBAgent: An RL-Based Agent for Autonomous Database Operations and Maintenance. VLDB 2026 (Industrial Track), Boston, USA
  3. [SIGKDD] Wenjun Wang, Xin Cao, Yawen Li, XiaoLong Deng, Kai Zheng*: Conflicting Node Discrimination Graph Neural Network for Semi-supervised Node Classification. SIGKDD 2026, Jeju, Korea
  4. [SIGIR] Yi Zhang, Yiwen Zhang, Kai Zheng, Tong Chen, Hongzhi Yin: ProMax: Exploring the Potential of LLM-derivedProfiles with Distribution Shaping forRecommender Systems. SIGIR 2026, Melbourne, Australia
  5. [ICDE] Jinwen Chen, Hao Miao, Lei Jia, Guangqiang Yin, Yan Zhao, Kai Zheng*: Balancing Competition for Fairness-aware Task Assignment in Spatial Crowdsourcin. ICDE 2026, Montréal, Canada
  6. [ICDE] Banglie Yang, Liwei Deng, Cheng Dai, Kai Zheng*: Data-Segmentation Prompt based Continual Learning Framework for Online Spatio-Temporal Prediction. ICDE 2026, Montréal, Canada
  7. [ICDE] Yuyang Xia, Zibo Liang, Liwei Deng, Yan Zhao, Han Su, Kai Zheng*: Energy-Efficient Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Perception and Robust Decision. ICDE 2026, Montréal, Canada
  8. [WWW] Yuchen Fang, Shiyu Wang, Yuxuan Liang, Zhou Ye, Yang Xiang, Yan Zhao and Kai Zheng*: Efficient High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting with Transformers: A Channel Reordering Perspective. WWW 2026, Dubai, UAE
  9. [WWW] Qing Wei, Hao Miao, Yan Zhao, Kai Zheng*, Bin Yang, Volker Markl and Christian S. Jensen: Evolving Proxy Kills Drift: Data-Efficient Streaming Time Series Anomaly Detection. WWW 2026, Dubai, UAE
  10. [WWW] Jinwen Chen, Hao Miao, Chenxi Liu, Yan Zhao and Kai Zheng*: VisionST: Coordinating Cross-modal Traffic Prediction with Interactive Geo-image Encoding. WWW 2026, Dubai, UAE

Technical Reports

Preprints
  1. Yan Zhao, Liwei Deng, Xuanhao Chen, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang, Tung Kieu, Feiteng Huang, Torben Bach Pedersen, Kai Zheng, and Christian S. Jensen. A Comparative Study on Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Time Series: Experiments and Analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.04635 (2022)

Honors and Awards

Recognition
  • DASFAA 2023 Best Student Paper Runner-up. Tianjin, China, Apr, 2023
  • APweb 2022 Best Paper Award Runner-up. Nanjing, China, Nov, 2022
  • ICDE 2019 Best Paper Award. Macau SAR, China, April, 2019
  • WISE 2017 Best Paper Award. Moscow, Russia, October, 2017
  • WISE 2017 Best Student Paper Award. Moscow, Russia, October, 2017
  • APWeb 2017 Best Paper Award. Beijing, China, July, 2017
  • ICDE 2015 Best Paper Award. Seoul, South Korea, April, 2015
  • Australia Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award. January, 2014

Professional Activities

Academic Service

Chair Roles

  • PC co-Chair: Australasian Database Conference (ADC) 2026
  • Area Chair: ICDM 2026
  • PC co-Chair (industry): APWeb 2025
  • Area Chair: SIGKDD 2026, IJCAI 2025
  • PC co-Chair: MDM 2021
  • PC co-Chair (demo track): MDM 2019
  • General co-Chair: DASFAA 2017
  • PC co-chair: APWeb 2016

Editorial Board

  • Journal of World Wide Web (WWW Journal) (start from Dec 2024)
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (start from Dec 29th 2021)
  • Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD) (term 2018 - 2024)
  • Journal of Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE) (Start from March 2019)

Guest Editor

Program Committees

  • 2026: ICDE, KDD, CIKM, WWW
  • 2025: WWW, KDD, ICDE, DASFAA
  • 2024: ICDE, WWW, KDD, CIKM, DASFAA
  • 2023: WWW, WSDM, ICDE
  • 2022: KDD, WWW, PAKDD, MDM
  • 2021: ICDE, WWW, PAKDD, WISE
  • 2020: VLDB, ICDE, AAAI, KDD, IJCAI, CIKM, MDM, DASFAA, APWeb/WAIM, BigComp, ACML, PAKDD
  • 2019: VLDB, ICDE, AAAI, KDD, IJCAI, CIKM, MDM, DASFAA, APWeb/WAIM
  • 2018: SIGMOD (demo track), ICDE, KDD, IJCAI, WWW, DASFAA, APWeb/WAIM
  • 2017: DASFAA
  • 2016: SIGMOD, SIGSPATIAL
  • 2015: SIGMOD, CIKM, DASFAA
  • 2014: CIKM