Defu Cao is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, working with Prof. Yan Liu at the USC Melady Lab. Prior, he earned his Master's Degree at the school of EECS Peking University. Cao is primarily interested in developing machine learning and data mining algorithms that demonstrate a deep understanding of the world with special structures, including time series, spatio-temporal data, and relational data. To this end, his research aims to integrate causal inference, graph neural networks, spectral domain representation, interpretability, and robustness, he is also interested in multi-task learning and pre-training model in the NLP domain. He has published his research in top conference proceedings including AAAI, NeurIPS, ICRA, etc.