Associate professor Dongjin Song was recently awarded senior member status by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). AAAI is a leading international organization devoted to advancing research and education in artificial intelligence (AI). Song will receive the recognition at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence happening January 20-27, 2026, in Singapore.
“I am honored to be one of 11 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence members to be elected to the Class of 2026 Senior Members,” said Song. “Congratulations to the other inductees on their achievements and long-standing efforts in the artificial intelligence field.”
Song, who joined the UConn School of Computing as an assistant professor in August 2020 and was promoted to an associate professor in August 2025, has made a name for himself in the AI research community.
His work spans machine learning, data science, deep learning, and related applications for time series analysis, graph representation learning, multimodal learning, reasoning, and agentic AI – with a particular focus on evolving graphs, dynamic systems, environmental sciences, healthcare, financial systems.
Notably, three of his papers, A Dual-Stage Attention-Based Recurrent Neural Network for Time Series Prediction (DARNN), Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HetGNN), and A Deep Neural Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Multivariate Time Series Data, have been ranked as the most influential papers in the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organizations (IJCAI) 2017, KDD, the premier data science and AI conference 2019, and the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2019, by paperdigest.com.
In addition to his strong research portfolio, Song was awarded the UConn Research Excellence Program (REP) Award in 2021 and the prestigious NSF CAREER Award in 2024 for his project titled, “Continual Learning on Evolving Graphs: from Memorization to Generalization,” showcasing his growing impact on both academic and practical applications of AI.
He also won the 2024 Frontiers of Science Award in Computer Science from the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), the 2025 UConn American Association of University Professors UConn Chapter (AAUP) Excellence Award for Research and Creativity – Early Career, the 2025 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention – Data Mining, and the Best Paper Award (3rd Prize CCC Award) from the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2025 BlueSky Track.
AAAI, founded in 1979 as the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, is a nonprofit scientific society dedicated to advancing the understanding of AI. AAAI’s mission is to integrate safe and responsible AI that benefits society, with their vision being to see AI empowering humanity.
The association is committed to facilitating collaboration, publication, and education across academia, industry, and beyond.
Senior member status in AAAI is reserved for members who have demonstrated significant accomplishments in the AI field. To be eligible for nomination, candidates must be a consecutive AAAI member for at least five years and be professionally active in the AI field for at least ten years.
