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.

[03/02/2026] 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 mission is to build robust and efficient theoretical foundations for large-scale AI models, ensuring they are reliable and effective when deployed to solve real-world problems. I bridge core methodological innovation in machine learning—such as theory-guided learning, model efficiency, and generalization analysis—with complex data structures like networks and time series. My research is driven by high-impact applications in healthcare, epidemiology, and social systems, where I aim to move beyond pure data-driven scaling toward models that are not only powerful but also principled, interpretable, and trustworthy.

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, 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!

    • Recent News

    • 02/2026 Contributed a chapter, 'How Do AI and LLMs Change Our Lives? Reflections and Outlook,' to the forthcoming book Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models: A Scientific Perspective.
    • 02/2026 One paper 'Visiting, Following, and Knowledge Sharing: Mining Network-Network Relationships in Crowd-Empowered Open Innovation' is accepted by Technology & Innovation Journal.
    • 02/2026 One paper 'Evaluating RAG and Non-RAG Pipelines for Concept Discovery in Environmental Health Ontologies' is accepted by AMIA Annual Symposium 2026.
    • 01/2026 One paper 'Convergence to steady state in LLM-Generated Ontological Concepts' is accepted by MIE 2026.
    • 10/2025 One paper 'Assessing the Macro and Micro Effects of Random Seeds on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models' is accepted by IJCNLP-AACL 2025.
    • 07/2025 One paper 'To what Degree can LLMs Support Medical Informatics Research? Examining the Interplay of Research Support LLMs with LLM Critics' is accepted by AMIA Annual Symposium 2025.
    • 06/2025 One poster 'Examining Effects of Participant Interaction Network Breadth and Skill Diversity on the Success of Open Innovation' was accepted by the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (https://ci.acm.org/2025/).
    • 04/2025 One paper 'A Concept Utility Framework for Incremental Ontology Expansion' is accepted by Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems: e-Health 2025.
    • 04/2025 One 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!