I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). I lead the Responsible and Reliable AI Lab (R² Lab). I received my PhD degree in Computer Science at Arizona State University (ASU) in 2022 advised by Dr. Huan Liu, M.Eng. degree in Industrial Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and B.Eng. degree in Industrial Engineering at Huazhong University of Science & Technology (HUST). My research interests are broadly in AI, with a particular focus on responsible and reliable AI, causal machine learning, foundation models, and their applications in science and social good. More details can be found in my CV.

Prospective students: I am constantly seeking curious and self-motivated PhD students. If you are interested, please email me your CV and transcript(s). Preference will be given to students who have worked with me before. I’m also happy to work with self-funded master’s and undergraduate students.

What is a PhD like? 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D./ Advice for students and junior researchers/ You and your research

News

• [12/2025] Invited tutorial on trustworthy foundation models at SkAI seminar.
• [12/2025] Invited talk at LUC CS seminar about our work on uncertainty and creativity in LLMs.
• [11/2025] One paper accepted to AAAI’26 as oral presentation.
• [11/2025] Five papers accepted to IEEE Big Data’25.
• [10/2025] One paper accepted to IJCNLP-AACL’25 Findings.
• [9/2025] Invited guest lecture at UNC Chapel Hill hosted by Zhun Deng.
• [9/2025] Our tutorial “Responsible GenFMs: From Foundational Principles to Real-World Impact” is accepted to ICDM’25.
• [8/2025] Two papers accepted to EMNLP’25.
• [8/2025] Our paper “Interpretable named entity recognition via integrating logical rule learning with deep neural networks” is accepted to Expert Systems with Application Journal.
• [8/2025] Our tutorial “Socially Responsible and Trustworthy Generative Foundation Models: Principles, Challenges, and Practices” is accepted to CIKM’25.
• [8/2025] R2 Lab welcomes four new members, Dehai, Haochang, Shicheng, and Weihao!
• [8/2025] Received an NSF grant to study LLM-augmented digital twin for Alzheimer’s Disease as PI.
• [7/2025] One paper accepted to COLM’25 and one paper accepted to the AI and Ethics journal.
• [7/2025] One paper accepted to TMLR.
• [6/2025] Received NSF CAREER Award to study responsible language models.
• [5/2025] Received Google Research Scholar Award to work on uncertainty in LLMs!
• [5/2025] Received another NAIRR Pilot Project computing resources.
• [5/2025] Our PAKDD’24 paper “Interpreting Pretrained Language Models via Concept Bottlenecks” is accepted to the IJCAI’25 Best Paper Track.
• [5/2025] Our book SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE AI: THEORIES AND PRACTICES has been featured in E-Book Collection on AI and Internet of Things 2.0 package that will be sold directly to libraries/research institutions!
• [4/2025] Our survey paper Conformal Prediction: A Data Perspective is accepted to ACM Computing Survey.
• [3/2025] Congrats to Shweta Girish Parihar (my first Master’s student) for successfully defending her Master’s thesis, which consists of two papers we recently submitted. She is currently on the job market, I highly recommend her!
• [3/2025] Our workshop “SciSoc LLM Workshop: Large Language Models for Scientific and Societal Advances” accepted to KDD’25. Thank Wei Jin for leading this!
• [2/2025] One paper accepted to SIGKDD Exploration.
• [1/2025] One paper accepted to NAACL’25 Main Conference.