Dr. Runlong Yu
Assistant Professor
Contact
- 2124 Cyber Hall
- phone (205) 348-2172
Research Areas
Education
- B.Eng., Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China, 2017
- Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China, 2023
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Alabama. Before joining UA, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Pittsburgh. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2023, following a B.Eng. in Computer Science from USTC in 2017. My primary research interest is to advance artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to address real-world challenges with broad societal and scientific impact. A central theme of my work is the development of machine learning models that integrate scientific knowledge, enabling adaptation to dynamic and uncertain environments. This interdisciplinary approach has applications across hydrology, aquatic science, wildfire science, climate science, agriculture, and biomedicine. A unifying perspective is to adopt a holistic Earth-system framework by developing foundation models and autonomous AI agents that capture the coupled dynamics of environmental, hydrological, ecological, and social systems. Methodologically, my research leverages multimodal datasets (including remote sensing imagery, in-situ measurements, and process-based simulations) and incorporates them into physics-guided learning and retrieval-augmented frameworks. These methods aim to synthesize knowledge, facilitate hypothesis generation, and model complex natural systems. At UA, I lead the AI for Science Lab, where we develop algorithms, tools, and platforms to advance interdisciplinary science. Our lab welcomes students and collaborators interested in AI, machine learning, and data-driven discovery for sustainability, resilience, and intelligent infrastructure.
Affiliated Areas
Computer Science
Selected Publications
- Yu, R., Qiu, C., Ladwig, R., Hanson, P., Xie, Y., Jia, X., “Physics-Guided Foundation Model for Scientific Discovery: An Application to Aquatic Science,” Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(27), 28548–28556, 2025.
- Yu, R., Xie, Y., Jia, X., “Environmental Computing as a Branch of Science,” Communications of the ACM, 68(7), 92–94, 2025.
- Yu, R., Qiu, C., Ladwig, R., Hanson, P.C., Xie, Y., Li, Y., Jia, X., “Adaptive Process-Guided Learning: An Application in Predicting Lake DO Concentrations,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 580–589, 2024.
- Yu, R., Xu, X., Ye, Y., Liu, Q., Chen, E., “Cognitive Evolutionary Search to Select Feature Interactions for Click-Through Rate Prediction,” Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 3151–3161, 2023.
- Yu, R., Liu, Q., Ye, Y., Cheng, M., Chen, E., Ma, J., “Collaborative List-and-Pairwise Filtering from Implicit Feedback,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 34(6), 2667–2680, 2022.
Awards and Honors
- China Scholarship Council Scholarship, Jul. 2021
- Champion, CCF BDCI Fighting Epidemics Big Data Charity Challenge, Jan. 2021
- China National Scholarship, Dec. 2019
- KDD CUP Regular ML Track, PaddlePaddle Special Award, Aug. 2019
- First Prize, Chinese Physics Olympiad, Oct. 2012