Hi!

I am an incoming Assistant Professor of the Data Science Department at William & Mary, starting in August 2025.

I am a Ph.D. student in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have been a member of the BLENDER Lab since 2017, supervised by Prof. Heng Ji. Previously, I graduated a summa cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a dual B.S. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics.

I am among the first researchers to develop a virtual scientific research assistant (i.e., PaperRobot [ACL 2019]) for literature-based discovery by extracting and synthesizing insights from papers. My research interest lies in Automated Literature Understanding and Scientific Discovery. My long-term vision is to develop AI for Scientists (AI4Scientist) tools to effectively accelerate and democratize the entire research lifecycle for scientists, from knowledge acquisition, hypothesis generation, multimedia procedure planning for experiment design, experiment execution, conduction to writing, and evaluating the paper draft.

My commitment to developing AI for Scientists (AI4Scientist) has led me to focus on a knowledge lifecycle with three components:

1. Few-shot Scientific Knowledge Acquisition
   • Examples: Multimedia COVID-KG (NAACL ‘21 Best Demo🏆) [I],Few-shot Chemical Entity Extraction [II,III]
2. Integrating Domain Knowledge with Scientific LLM Reasoning
   • Examples: Knowledge-aware Hypothesis Generation [IV], Experiment/Task Planning and Execution [V,VI]
3. Explainable Scientific Knowledge Dissemination
   • Examples: Knowledge-guided Paper Draft Writing Assistant [VII], Faithful Data-to-text Generation [VIII], Evidence-based Automatic Paper Assessment [IX]

I’m happy to collaborate and answer questions about my research. I especially encourage students from underrepresented groups to reach out, as I commited to foster diversity, equity and inclusion in our community.

Recent News

• Dec 11, 2024: Excited to give an invited talk, AI4Scientist: Accelerating and Democratizing Scientific Research Lifecycle at The Cosmic Horizons: AI-Powered Insights into the Universe conference, organized by NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI), in May 2025!

• Sep 20, 2024: We will organize the second AI4Research: Towards a Knowledge-grounded Scientific Research Lifecycle at AAAI 2025 in Philadelphia! Please submit your research on OpenReview by Nov 24!

• Aug 20, 2024: Invited talk “SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty” at Elsevier.

• Aug 15, 2024: Gene-Metabolite Association Prediction with Interactive Knowledge Transfer Enhanced Graph for Metabolite Production was accpeted by BIBM 2024.

• Apr 26, 2024: Invited talk “AIScientist: Toward Automated Literature Understanding and Scientific Discovery” at PSU.

• May 15, 2024: SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty was accpeted by ACL 2024. [AI News (5th June 2023)] [AI Breakdown] [MMLI Newsletter]

• Mar 13, 2024: Named Entity Recognition Under Domain Shift via Metric Learning for Life Sciences was accpeted by NAACL-HLT 2024.

• Mar 8, 2024: Invited talk “SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

• Jan 18, 2024: Chem-FINESE: Validating Fine-Grained Few-shot Entity Extraction through Text Reconstruction was accepted by EACL 2024 Findings.

• Nov 18, 2023: We will present a tutorial on Towards a Human-Computer Collaborative Scientific Paper Lifecycle at LREC-COLING 2024 in Italy!

• Oct 2, 2023: We will present a tutorial at EACL2024 in Malta and organize the first “Language + Molecules” workshop at ACL2024 in Bangkok!