Shen Wins NSF CAREER Award  

July 21, 2025 -  Yanning Shen, UC Irvine engineering associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been recognized with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation.  

Shen received $550,000 from the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems to support her lab group's efforts to develop trustworthy and socially responsible artificial intelligence AI systems that learn from network data, such as social or transportation networks.   

“Our goal is to ensure these technologies benefit society at large by enabling more transparent and accountable decision-making across domains,” Shen said.   

The science of networks has emerged as a major catalyst for understanding the behavior of complex interconnected entities, which can be described using graphs. For example, cyber-physical systems including the Internet of Things involve interactions among devices, and social networks can be modeled as graphs capturing various relationships among people or groups. Graph-based machine learning (ML) algorithms exhibit well-documented performance in learning over graphs (LoG). Despite their success, the impact of these algorithms in real-world systems depends heavily on how socially responsible they are. Shen explains, however, that this issue is largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, Shen's group will develop a systematic understanding of unfairness in LoG, leading to the design of efficient and principled algorithms for fair LoG.  

The project will contribute valuable theoretical insights and algorithm design, to make ML models more trustworthy and socially responsible. In the meantime, it will also engage and educate the next generation of students to critically understand and shape the societal impact of AI.   

– Cassandra Nava