Dr. Zhang’s main research interests include multimedia semantic computing and engineering, data mining and machine learning, semantic integration from multi-modality data sources (e.g., image, video, and text), biomedical computing, computer security and forensics, and geographical information systems.

The current research activities at Dr. Zhang’s KKDM Laboratory focus on the following areas:

• Multimedia forensics for anti-terrorism and identification of online crime forums (e.g., detection of objects-of-interest such as ISIS logos and credit card images on Facebook/Twitter, etc.).
• Spatial-temporal event mining from videos (e.g., person-reidentification and abnormal event mining such as traffic accidents, etc.).
• Image and video databases and content-based information retrieval (e.g., search by image/video example, image classification, and object classification, etc.).
• Collaborative filtering for recommendation systems (e.g., restaurant/hotel recommendation systems, etc.).
• Biomedical image/video data mining (e.g., prediction of bodyfat percentage from 2D photos, machine classification of melanoma and nevi from skin lesions, etc.).
• Multimedia CAPTCHAs (e.g., image/video based CAPTCHAs and their security analysis).
• Image spam and phishing data mining.

The KDDM laboratory has applied research to many application domains, with close collaboration with cyber-security specialists, colleagues in physical medicine & rehabilitation, biostatistics, and government, as well as with industrial collaborators such as IBM and eBay. The methods and tools have so far been applied to healthcare applications, traffic surveillance applications, image analysis and retrieval (e.g., canonical view extraction, object-based image retrieval, and image spam mining), the identification of events of interest for sports videos, bio-medical image/video mining (e.g., histological image analysis for skin cancer screening), and email spam and phishing kit data mining. More recently, our research areas have been expanded to include social science applications and biomedical text mining. Some highlight systems include analysis of organizational patterns of lobbying activities and automatic extraction of gene co-expression hypotheses from published biomedical literature. Our research is currently supported by NSF and NIH.

• Database Systems
• Object-Oriented Design
• Multimedia Information Retrieval

Multimedia Databases and Data Mining

• Ligaj Pradhan, Chengcui Zhang, and Pradip Chitrakar. Multi-view clustering in collaborative filtering based rating prediction. In Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing. 250-253.
• Lin Yang, John Johnstone, and Chengcui Zhang. 2010. Ranking canonical views for tourist attractions. International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, 46, No. 2-3 (January, 2010), 573-89.
• Xin Chen, Chengcui Zhang, Shu-Ching Chen, and Stuart H. Rubin. 2009. A human-centered multiple instance learning framework for semantic video retrieval. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Part C, 39, 2, 228-33. 

Multimedia Forensics and Security

• Xinpeng L. Liao, Pradip Chitrakar, Chengcui Zhang, and Gary Warner. 2015. Object-of-interest retrieval in social media image databases for e-crime forum detection. International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering & Management, 6, 3.
• Lin Yang, Wei-Bang Chen, Chengcui Zhang, John Johnstone, Gary Warner, and Song Gao. 2012. Profiling Online Auction Sellers by Image Editing Styles. IEEE Multimedia, 19, 1 (Jan. 2012), 29-39.

• Jianhua Yan, Keqi Zhang, Chengcui Zhang, Shu-Ching Chen, and Giri Narasimhan. 2015. Automatic construction of 3D building model from airborne LIDAR data through 2D snake algorithm. IEEE Trans. on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 53, 1 (Jan. 2012), 3-14. 
• Jianhua Yan, Keqi Zhang, Chengcui Zhang, et al. 2007. A graph reduction method for 2D snake problems. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR07).

Bioinformatics

• Wei-Bang Chen and Chengcui Zhang. 2009. A hybrid framework for protein sequences clustering and classification using signature motif information. Journal of Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, 16, 4 (Dec. 2009), 353-65.
• Richa Tiwari, Chengcui Zhang, Thamar Solorio, and Wei-Bang Chen. 2012. A supervised machine learning approach of extracting and ranking published papers describing coexpression relationships among genes. Recent Trends in Information Reuse and Integration. Springer-Verlag. Tansel Özyer Keivan Kian Mehr; Mehmet Tan, eds.

• Chair, IEEE Technical Committee on Semantic Computing
• Secretary and Newsletter Editor, IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing
• Steering Committee Voting Member, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. (ICME)
• Steering Committee Member, Society of Information Reuse and Integration (SIRI)

Journal Associate Editor

• IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (since June 2015)
• International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM)

Journal Editorial Board

• The Scientific World Journal (impact factor: 1.730)
• The International Journal of Multimedia
• Journal of Advances in Multimedia
• International Journal of  u- and e- Service, Science and Technology
• International Journal of Computer and Informatics
• International Journal of Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering
• The International Journal of Principles and Applications in Information Science and Technology

Program Chair

• 2016 International Symposium on Multimedia, San Jose, CA, USA, December 11-13, 2016
• The 6th FTRA International Conference on Information Technology Convergence and Services, Taipei, Taiwan, Oct. 16-18, 2014
• 2014 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo.
• 2013 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration
• 2012 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration
• 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia
• 2010 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering