Hello! I am João Mattos 
I am a Computer Science PhD Student at Rice University. My research interests cover the intersection between Graphs and Machine Learning. I am currently advised by Prof. Arlei Silva.
Besides Computer Science, I am fascinated by art, specifically Music, Cinema, and Literature! Finally, I am a guitar player, so if you want to jam, just reach out!
CV | LinkedIn
Email: jrm28 {at} rice {dot} edu
Interests
- Graph Representation Learning
- Model Evaluation
- GNNs and Expressive Power
Education
- PhD in Computer Science, 2022 - TBD
- Rice University 🇺🇸
- BSc in Computer Science, 2017 - 2022
- Universidade de São Paulo 🇧🇷
Awards
- KDD 2025 - NSF Student Travel Award
- Best Research Talk - Computer Science Department - 1st place - Spring 2024
- D2K Research Mentoring Fellowship - Spring 2024 - (Showcase 1st Place Winner)
- D2K Research Mentoring Fellowship - Fall 2023
Academic Service
- Reviewer: KDD, TIST, ICDM, LoG, ICML (LatinX in AI), NeurIPS (LatinX in AI)
News
- Nov 2025: Our paper "Breaking the Dyadic Barrier: Rethinking Fairness in Link Prediction Beyond Demographic Parity" to AAAI-26 as an Oral.
- Oct 2025: Presented our work "Breaking the Dyadic Barrier: Rethinking Fairness in Link Prediction Beyond Demographic Parity" at the Meta PhD Forum 2025
- May 2025: Our paper “TrafficPulse: A Road-Sensor Assisted Traffic Tweet Misinformation Detection System” was awarded the Best Paper Award at the SecureTrans 2025 Workshop! 🎉
- May 2025: Started as an Applied Research Intern @ eBay Inc.
- Mar 2024: Our paper “TrafficPulse: A Road-Sensor Assisted Traffic Tweet Misinformation Detection System” was accepted to the SecureTrans 2025 Workshop! 🎉
- Nov 2024: Our paper “Attribute-Enhanced Similarity Ranking for Sparse Link Prediction” was accepted to KDD 2025! 🎉
Papers
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Breaking the Dyadic Barrier: Rethinking Fairness in Link Prediction Beyond Demographic Parity - João Mattos, Debolina Halder Lina, Arlei Silva - AAAI-26 (Oral)
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TrafficPulse: A Road-Sensor-Assisted Traffic Tweet Misinformation Detection System - Frank Ran, Yifan Wu, Delaram Pirhayatifard, Joao Mattos, Arlei Silva - BEST PAPER AWARD – To appear at SecureTrans 2025 Workshop
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Attribute-Enhanced Similarity Ranking for Sparse Link Prediction - João Pedro Rodrigues Mattos, Zexi Huang, Mert Kosan, Ambuj Singh, Arlei Lopes da Silva - KDD 2025 Full Paper | Source Code
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Semi-Supervised Graph Attention Networks for Event Representation Learning - João Pedro Rodrigues Mattos, Ricardo Marcacini - ICDM 2021
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Smart toys and children's privacy: usable privacy policy insights from a card sorting experiment - André de Lima Salgado, Felipe Silva Dias, João Pedro Rodrigues Mattos, Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Patrick CK Hung - SIGDOC 2019