About Me

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology, also a joint faculty with the Department of Computer Science. I am previously a research fellow with Prof. Timothy Miller and Prof. Guergana Savova in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I completed my Ph.D. of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, co-supervised by Prof. Madhav Marathe and Prof. Jiangzhuo Chen.

[03/17/2025] There are openings. I am looking for highly motivated students (including PhDs, Masters, undergraduates) to join my group. Please check the opening positions if you are interested in working with me.

Research Interests

My research interests span across artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), natural language processing (NLP), time series analysis, graph learning, and network science, with a strong emphasis on solving problems in networks and sequences. My work is inherently interdisciplinary, bridging theoretical foundations with practical applications to address complex, real-world challenges, such as epidemic forecasting, EHR data analysis, human behavior analysis, or recommender systems.

Big Events

  • The ICDM 2025 conference will be held in Washington DC, in November 2025. My colleague and I are organizing the PhD Forum. More details are coming, please refer to this link.
  • The AAAI 2025 conference will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in February, 2025. My colleague and I are organizing a two-day doctoral consortium for AAAI. PhD students are encouraged to submit their work by Sep 30, 2024. For more details, please refer to this link. Accepted submissions (thesis summary) will automatically be included in the AAAI proceedings.
  • We will have an exciting debate: Teaching in AI Era: Challenges and Opportunities at ACSIC (Association of Chinese Scholars in Computing) SOFA 2024, May 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to come and join us!

    • News

    • 04/2025 Our paper 'KEGNN: Knowledge-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for User Engagement Prediction' is accepted by ICMR 2025.
    • 03/2025 Received Two Grace Hopper Artificial Intelligence Research Grants. Thanks NJIT!
    • 08/2024 Our paper 'When Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence: Topics and Sentiments about ChatGPT in Online Knowledge Sharing Communities' is accepted by HICSS 2024.
    • 12/2023 Our paper 'Exploring Graph Structure in Graph Neural Networks for Epidemic Forecasting' is presented at NeurIPS 2023 Temporal Graph Learning Workshop.
    • 10/2023 Our paper 'A computable case definition for patients with SARS-CoV2 testing that occurred outside the hospital' is published at JAMIA OPEN.
    • 06/2023 Invited to serve as PC for IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, NeurIPS, ICML, IEEE BigData.
    • 05/2023 Our paper 'Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Improved Bias and Variance for Large Pretrained Language Models' is accepted at ACL'23.
    • 04/2023 Received NJIT FY24 Faculty Seed Grant. Thank you NJIT!
    • 12/2022 Our paper 'Enhancing COVID-19 Ensemble Forecasting Model Performance Using Auxiliary Data Sources' received best paper award at IEEE BigData'22.
    • 07/2022 Our paper on ensemble-based fine-tuning for temporal relation extraction from EMRs is accepted at ClinicalNLP'22.
    • 01/2022 I am honored to be nominated by Professor Richard Stearns to attend The 9th HLF 2022.
    • 12/2021 Our paper on causal-based GNN for epidemic forecasting is accepted at AAAI'22.
    • 09/2021 I will join Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School as a research fellow.
    • 09/2021 A book chapter of combining theory and data driven approaches for epidemic forecasts is to be published in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series of CRC Press.
    • 09/2021 As a panel member, a paper aimed at creating guidelines for reporting forecast results in scientific publications is accepted to PLOS Medicine.
    • 08/2021 Invited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for AAAI'22.
    • 07/2021 Successfully defended my thesis. Thanks to my committee members!
    • 07/2021 Invited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for IEEE ICMLA'21 and IJCAI-ECAI'22.
    • 05/2021 Our paper on forecasting county-level COVID-19 case counts using ensembling of multiple types of models is accepted at SIGKDD'21.
    • 05/2021 Invited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for IEEE BigData'21.
    • 05/2021 Our work on modeling of COVID-19 scenarios is published at CDC MMWR.
    • 05/2021 Invited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for CIKM'21.
    • 05/2021 Was a volunteer at AAMAS'21.
    • 03/2021 Invited to give a talk about COVID-19 forecasting using GNN at CAPWIC'21.
    • 01/2021 Invited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for IJCAI'21.
    • 12/2020 Passed my Ph.D. proposal exam. Thanks to my committee members!
    • 12/2020 One paper accepted at AAMAS'21.
    • 11/2020 One paper accepted at NatureComms.
    • 11/2020 One paper accepted at IJCAI workshop AI4SG'21.
    • 11/2020 One paper accepted at IEEE BigData workshop DSMH'20.
    • 09/2020 One paper accepted at NeurIPS'20.
    • 09/2020 Invited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for AAAI'21.
    • 08/2020 One paper accepted at CIKM'20.
    • 03/2020 One paper accepted at ACM TSAS.
    • 05/2019 Started Research Scientist Intern at Industrial AI Lab (HAL), Hitachi America, Ltd. at Santa Clara, CA, USA.
    • 01/2019 Received Student Travel Award for AAAI'19.
    • 01/2019 One paper accepted at IAAI'19.
    • 12/2018 Presented a poster of our work at the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) meeting.
    • 06/2018 One paper accepted at WWW Journal.
    • 07/2018 One paper accepted at IJCAI'18.
    • 06/2017 Oral presentation at INSNA'17.
    • 04/2017 Passed my Ph.D. Qualify exam. Thanks to my committee members!
    • 03/2017 Was a volunteer at 2017 Joint PI Meeting: NSF BIGDATA and Big Data Hubs & Spokes, Washington DC, USA.
    • 01/2017 One paper accepted at IEEE ICC'17.
    • 11/2016 One paper accepted at CSSSA'16.
    • 07/2016 Recieved the UW Biostatistics 2016 Summer Institutes Scholarship.
    • 01/2016 Became a Ph.D. student of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.