Assistant Professor
CS@VT
(starting Spring 2021)

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. Prior to VT, I spent one year as research scientist (Research Staff Member) at IBM Almaden Research Center, working on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval problems. I obtained my Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign, under the supervision of Prof. ChengXiang Zhai, Text Information Management and Analysis Group (TIMAN).

My main work is in the intersection of Data Science and Machine Learning, particularly improving Deep Learning models for real-world scenarios, considering all sorts of bottlenecks related to data noise, sparsity, domain shift and lack of annotations. I mainly focus on Active and Semi-supervised learning. Previously worked on Deep Learning for Social Media Analysis. Social media text is informal, abundant and full of linguistic variations. TextNormSeq2Seq is a hybrid Seq2Seq model that can serve as a pre-processing step for any NLP application to adapt to noisy social media text. I have also participated on interdisciplinary projects that touch societal problems. You can learn more by looking at my publications or the descriptions of current and past projects. I am excited about opportunities to collaborate in areas such as Reinforcement Learning, Multi-agent RL and Meta-learning.

News

  • December, 2020: Will be teaching CS6604: Data Challenges in Machine Learning. If you are a VT student interested in ML research, consider taking this course. More details will be up soon.
  • December, 2020: Happy to be recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer for EMNLP 2020.
  • November, 2020: Will be joining Virginia Tech, Department of Computer Science as tenured-track assistant professor.
  • November, 2019: Successfully defended my PhD thesis: Data Quality in the Deep Learning era. Will be joining IBM Research at the end of November.
  • October, 2019: Attending ISWC 2019 in Auckland, NZ (travel award)
  • August, 2019: Selected to participate in the EECS Rising Stars 2019 workshop
  • July, 2019: CS@UIUC Travel Grant to attend Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, FL.
  • March, 2019: Paper accepted to ICWSM 2019.
  • June, 2018: Short paper accepted to ISWC 2018.
  • May, 2018: Internship @ IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA.
  • March, 2018: Paper accepted to ITiCSE 2018.
  • February, 2018: Paper accepted to PAKDD 2018.
  • February, 2018: Workshop paper accepted to HumL@WWW 2018.
  • December, 2017: Presented poster on Reward Augmentation in Text-based Deep Reinforcement Learning @ WiML