About

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology, with a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science.

Previously, I was 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. in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, co-supervised by Prof. Madhav Marathe and Prof. Jiangzhuo Chen.

Hiring · March 2026

I am looking for highly motivated students (PhD, Master's, and undergraduate) to join my group. See the open positions page 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 — 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.

Upcoming & Recent Events

  • Join us at NJIT's AI Exploration Day on March 26 at 11:30 AM for our session, The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine and Healthcare. Details: exploreai.njit.edu.
  • The ICDM 2025 conference, Washington DC, November 2025 — co-organizing the PhD Forum. conference site.
  • AAAI 2025, Philadelphia, February 2025 — co-organizing the two-day Doctoral Consortium. call for submissions.
  • Debate panel: Teaching in the AI Era: Challenges and Opportunities at ACSIC SOFA 2024, May 2024, Philadelphia.

News

  • 2026
  • Apr 2026 paperExtended abstract A Locally Agentic AI for 3D Neurosurgical Visualization and Segmentation accepted to NE Agents Day 2026.
  • Mar 2026 paperAbstract Quantifying the Predictability of Epidemic Dynamics: An Entropy-Aware Evaluation of Forecasting Models accepted at NEBEC 2026.
  • Feb 2026 chapterContributed 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.
  • Feb 2026 paperVisiting, Following, and Knowledge Sharing: Mining Network-Network Relationships in Crowd-Empowered Open Innovation accepted by Technology & Innovation Journal.
  • Feb 2026 paperEvaluating RAG and Non-RAG Pipelines for Concept Discovery in Environmental Health Ontologies accepted by AMIA Annual Symposium 2026.
  • Jan 2026 paperConvergence to Steady State in LLM-Generated Ontological Concepts accepted by MIE 2026.
  • 2025
  • Oct 2025 paperAssessing the Macro and Micro Effects of Random Seeds on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models accepted by IJCNLP-AACL 2025.
  • Jul 2025 paperTo What Degree Can LLMs Support Medical Informatics Research? Examining the Interplay of Research Support LLMs with LLM Critics accepted by AMIA Annual Symposium 2025.
  • Jun 2025 paperPoster Examining Effects of Participant Interaction Network Breadth and Skill Diversity on the Success of Open Innovation accepted by the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference.
  • Apr 2025 paperA Concept Utility Framework for Incremental Ontology Expansion accepted by Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems: e-Health 2025.
  • Apr 2025 paperKEGNN: Knowledge-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for User Engagement Prediction accepted by ICMR 2025.
  • Mar 2025 grantReceived two Grace Hopper Artificial Intelligence Research Grants. Thanks NJIT!
  • 2024 & earlier
  • Aug 2024 paperWhen Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence: Topics and Sentiments about ChatGPT in Online Knowledge Sharing Communities accepted by HICSS 2024.
  • Dec 2023 talkExploring Graph Structure in Graph Neural Networks for Epidemic Forecasting presented at NeurIPS 2023 Temporal Graph Learning Workshop.
  • Oct 2023 paperA computable case definition for patients with SARS-CoV2 testing that occurred outside the hospital published at JAMIA Open.
  • Jun 2023 serviceInvited to serve as PC for IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, NeurIPS, ICML, IEEE BigData.
  • May 2023 paperTwo-Stage Fine-Tuning for Improved Bias and Variance for Large Pretrained Language Models accepted at ACL 2023.
  • Apr 2023 grantReceived NJIT FY24 Faculty Seed Grant. Thank you NJIT!