Welcome!
We are the Network and Data Science (NDS) lab at Vanderbilt University, led by Tyler Derr. Our research lies in data mining and machine learning, especially deep learning on graphs, social network analysis, and data science for social good with applications such as drug discovery, education, political science, autism research, etc.
We are recruiting PhD students to work with us in the NDS Lab on topics in our general interests (see NDS Lab research interests below). Master’s and undergraduate students within Vanderbilt University and visiting scholars are also welcome. Please see here for position details.
We are grateful to the following for supporting our research:
News
8/2025
Tyler received a Young Investigator Best Paper Award (3rd) at KDD’25 Health Day!
8/2025
Yu received ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention!
8/2025
Tyler will serve as Editorial Board Member for ACM AI Letters, a newly launched rapid-publication journal for impactful AI research!
8/2025
Preprint Towards Bridging Review Sparsity in Recommendation with Textual Edge Graph Representation is now online!
8/2025
Honored to serve as Senator in Vanderbilt’s Faculty Senate as a School of Engineering representative!
7/2025
Awarded NSF grant for the project Towards Well-Rounded Graph Retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation!
7/2025
Our paper “Explanation Difference: Bridging Procedural and Distributional Fairness” is accepted at AAAI/ACM AIES!
6/2025
Tyler gave an invited Blue Sky Spotlight talk at KDD’25 Health Day: “Referral Required: When AI Blocks Access to Human Doctors”!
6/2025
Tyer was recognized as a 2024 Top Scholar by ScholarGPS (top 0.5% worldwide overall; top 100 in Data Mining)!
6/2025
Our paper “Edges Matter: An Analysis of Graph Time-Series Representations for Temporal Networks” is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE)!
5/2025
Our paper Personalization of Large Language Models: A Survey is accepted in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)!
5/2025
Our paper BTS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tie Strength Prediction is accepted at KDD’25!
5/2025
Tyler was selected as an inaugural Vanderbilt CARE Fellow to help enhance student well-being and a supportive campus environment!
5/2025
Preprint Amplifying Your Social Media Presence: Personalized Influential Content Generation with LLMs is now online!