Hi! I am Zhanwen Chen (he/him/his), a Data Science Ph.D. student the at the Reasoning and Knowledge Discovery (RISE) Lab at the University of Virginia. Our lab was previously at the University of Georgia School of Computing.

My CV (updated February 14, 2024) is here

Research Interest

I am fascinated by one research question: can computers reason about visual and textual scenes like humans? In other words, how to extract, understand, memorize, and reason with semantic knowledge from both vision and text? I ground this long-term goal to the following research problems:

Research Papers

Industry Experiences

Awards

Blog Articles

Fun things

I'm a classically trained pianist and a singer (baritone). My favorite composers are J.S. Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Francis Poulenc. Fun fact: at one point in life I almost became a professional pianist but I decided against the conservatory life. Here's me in concert (I come in at 1:07):

I love hiking and kayaking. I went on my first kayaking trip in Summer 2020 and since then the Vanderbilt ML armada has been terrorizing the rivers of Tennessee. I also enjoy traveling (pre- and hopefully post-COVID) and cooking various cuisines.