Biography

I am working as a Teaching Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I have also been appointed as Graduate Faculty of the Graduate College and Faculty Affiliate of the Illinois Informatics at UIUC. In addtion, I am affiliated with the Social Sensing & Intelligence Lab at UIUC as a Senior Researcher. Before that I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in iSchool at UIUC. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Notre Dame advised by Prof. Dong Wang. I also worked as the W. J. Cody Research Associate at Argonne National Laboratory.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-AI Collaboration. In particular, my research aims to explicitly utilize the human intelligence from crowdsourcing systems (i.e., crowd intelligence) to effectively design, configure, and troubleshoot the AI models to improve the performance, fairness, explainability, and accountability of the AI models in real-world applications.
I am delighted to design principled solutions that integrate the state-of-the-art crowdsourcing techniques (e.g., Amazon MTurk), AI models (e.g., convolutional/recurrent/graph neural network, generative adversarial network, transfer/contrastive learning), and estimation theoretical approaches (e.g., maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), subjective logic) to jointly model the diversified yet complementary AI and crowd intelligence to address a rich set of complex real-world problems including urban infrastructure monitoring, disaster damage assessment, traffic risk prediction, misinformation detection, etc.