About me

I’m expecting to graduate in May 2024 and am currently on the job market!

Hi! I’m a final-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am part of the Data Mining Group (DMG) advised by Prof. Jiawei Han. I also closely collaborate with the BLENDER lab led by Prof. Heng Ji.

I also received my masters degree from UIUC. Before that, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I’ve spent time as an intern at Microsoft, Amazon and Apple.

You can find my resume here: [resume]

Research Interests

Broadly speaking, I work within the scope of natural language processing and text mining.

Some of my current interests include:

• Flexible, on-demand information extraction. Standard task definitions of entity, relation and event extraction fail to meet the needs of many customized applications. Can we develop IE to be a “declarative language’’ that works for any given output format?
• Knowledge representation within language models. We all know that language models acquire lots of world knowledge during pre-training. How is that knowledge organized and how can we modify and control it?
• Planning and learning from feedback. Language models are quite good at decomposing high-level goals into mid-level steps. How can these mid-level steps be grounded into feasible actions for the agent? How can the planning model learn from the execution outcome of the agent and signals from the environment? How should multiple specialized agents interact?