Assistant Professor
Computer Science
Virginia Tech

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where I lead the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab. I am also a 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.

Prior to VT, I spent a 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). I was selected as an EECS Rising Star participant in 2019.

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., embodied AI, language grounding, text-to-video generation, talking-head synthesis, (bio)medical imaging, 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.

News

  • August, 2022: Co-organizing the first-ever NeurIPS 2022 Gaze Meets ML workshop.
  • August, 2022: Excited to receive new DARPA KMASS funding!
  • July, 2022: Thank you to Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) for funding our proposal on ML-based automated code repair. Looking foward to working with PI Daphne Yao and Co-PI Bimal Viswanath.
  • June, 2022: Will be giving a keynote at ACM PETRA 2022. Also serving as the PETRA’22 Doctoral Consortium Chair. Looking forward to meeting students and conference attendees.
  • April, 2022: Thrilled to join the NeurIPS 2022 Organizing Commitee as an Expo co-Chair!
  • March, 2022: Gave a talk at the Women in STEM Mentoring Seminars. Slides are available here.
  • February, 2022: We are grateful to receive an NSF EAGER CMMI-AM grant!