Assistant Professor
iSchool@UIUC

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I lead the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab. My research interests are broadly defined at the intersection of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science. My work revolves around machine learning challenges related to data, e.g., learning with limited imperfect supervision, self-supervision, zero-shot learning, adversarial training, essentially work under the theme of Data Quality in Machine Learning, and multi-modal learning with applications to Vision + Language, e.g., (bio)medical imaging, embodied AI, language grounding, text-to-video generation, etc. Overall, I am interested in building intelligent task assistants that augment human intelligence. I have extensively collaborated on transdisciplinary projects that touch societal dimensions, in areas ranging from Health Informatics and Genomics to Education, Manufacturing, and Social Computing. Before joining iSchool@Illinois, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, a core faculty member of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Discovery Analytics, and an affiliate faculty member of the National Security Institute and the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture.

News

  • February, 2024: Serving as AC for ECCV’24 and MICCAI’24, and as Associate PC Co-Chair for ACM PETRA’24.
  • January, 2024: Excited to be joining iSchool@Illinois!
  • December, 2023: Honored to be recognized as Best Vice Co-Chair at IEEE BigData 2023.
  • October, 2023: Grateful to Amazon-VT for the new funding to continue work on Embodied AI.
  • October 2023: Congratulations to Ying (co-advised with Lifu Huang) for receiving an Amazon-VT Fellowship!
  • August, 2023: Excited to receive new DARPA ECOLE funding as part of the STR team!
  • May, 2023: Received a VT COE 2023 Dean’s Award for Excellence as an Outstanding New Assistant Professor!
  • March, 2023: Joined the NeurIPS 2023 and IEEE BigData 2023 Organizing Committees as a Workshop co-Chair and a Vice Program Chair, respectively.
  • March, 2023: Invited talk at UMass CIIR Talk Series.