Dongkuan (DK) Xu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, where he leads the Generative Intelligent Computing (GIC) Lab. His research focuses on deep learning, language models, and computer vision, with the goal of building efficient and reliable agentic AI systems that can reason, learn, and adapt in open-world environments. His long-term goal is to develop AI systems that can learn, reason, and collaborate with humans in open-world environments.

His work studies how to design scalable AI systems that remain efficient, robust, and trustworthy when deployed in dynamic real-world settings. By integrating advances in machine learning with system-level optimization and hardware–algorithm co-design, his research develops adaptive AI technologies that improve the efficiency, reliability, and usability of modern generative AI systems. His research has been applied across domains including education, networking, robotics, environmental intelligence, and healthcare.

Xu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Pennsylvania State University in 2022. His research has been recognized with several honors including the NC State College of Engineering Dean’s Applied AI Research Accelerator Award (2026), the AAAI Best Demonstration Award (2025), AAAI New Faculty Highlights (2025), the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award (2025), the Microsoft Accelerating Foundation Models Research Award (2024), the NC State Carla Savage Award (2024), and best paper honors at IEEE IPCCC (2024) and ICCCN (2023). His work has appeared in leading venues across artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, and systems. He actively serves the research community as a workshop organizer, area chair, and reviewer for NSF and major conferences including AAAI, CVPR, DAC, and KDD.

More information is available at: https://i.dk-lab.xyz/