 
 
										
									Jay Pujara
Research Associate Professor
Précis
- Director, Center on Knowledge Graphs
- Research Associate Professor, USC CS
- Principal Scientist, Information Sciences Institute
- Areas: AI, ML, NLP, Knowledge Graphs
- Postdoc, UC Santa Cruz (2016-2017)
- PhD, University of Maryland, College Park (2010-2016)
- Research Intern, Google (2014) & LinkedIn (2012)
- Senior Engineer, Yahoo! Mail Antispam (2006-2010)
- MS and BS, Carnegie Mellon University (2000-2005)
- 4 best paper awards and over 50 refereed publications
- Research Group: JAUNTS
- E-mail: jay@cs.umd.edu
News
- Fall 2024
- 
    Paper on Discovering reasoning structure with Pei at NeurIPS
 Paper on Abstract non-verbal bencharks with Yifan, Jiarui, Kexuan, & Kian at NeurIPS
 Paper on Non-verbal LLM reasoning with Kian, Kexuan, Jiarui, & Yifan at COLM
 
- Summer 2024
- 
    Now a Research Associate Professor of CS at USC
 Our NSF project on Table Understanding for Paleoclimate Studies was funded
 Paper on Faithful Conversational Data with Pegah in ACL Findings
 
- Spring 2024
- 
    Congratulations to new JAUNTS grads Kexuan Sun, Pei Zhou, & Avijit Thawani
 Paper on Decoder-only Unlimiformer with Kian at COLING
 Paper on Reranking for KGQA with Kexuan at COLING
 Demo on Reducing Diet Water Footprints with Saurav at AAAI
 
- Fall 2023
- 
    Awarded SWSA Ten-Year Award for Knowledge Graph Identification
 Paper on KG Usability at ISWC with Ana & Kian
 4 Papers at EMNLP: TKG forecasting, LLM data creation, live-stream moderation, & token learning
Education
University of Maryland, College Park, 2010-2016
												
School of Computer Science
												
Ph.D. Computer Science
												
Thesis: Probabilistic Models for Scalable Knowledge Graph Construction
											
University of California, Santa Cruz, 2014-2015
												
Jack Baskin School of Engineering
												
Visiting Student
											
Carnegie Mellon University, 2014
												
Machine Learning Department
												
Visiting Research Scholar
											
Carnegie Mellon University, 2004-2005
												
School of Computer Science
												
M.S. Computer Science
												
Thesis: Understanding Feature Selection in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging 
											
Carnegie Mellon University, 2000-2004
												
School of Computer Science
												
B.S. Computer Science
												
Minors in Logic and Computation, Mathematical Science, and Robotics 
												
Thesis: Machine Learning Classification of fMRI data
												
University Honors and College Honors
											
Carnegie Mellon University, 2001-2004
												
Carnegie Institute of Technology
												
B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering
												
University Honors
											
Carnegie Mellon University, 2001-2004
												
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
												
B.S. Cognitive Science
												
University Honors
											
Awards
Outstanding Paper Award, Intelligent User Interfaces, 2019
Top Reviewer, Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018
Best Paper Award, Statistical Relational Learning Workshop, 2016
Outstanding Reviewer, International Joint Conference on AI, 2016
Best Student Paper Award, International Semantic Web Conference, 2013
Best Paper Award, Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-abuse, and Spam, 2011
Dean’s Fellowship Award, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010-2012
Yahoo! FREP Award, “Active Feature Acquisition”, Advisor: Martin Zinkevich, 2010-2012
Lemonade Stand Multi-agent Competition, 2nd place, 2009; 3rd place, 2010
Experience
University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, 2017-
											  
Research Associate Professor, Computer Science (2024-)
											  
Research Assistant Professor, Computer Science (2017-2024)
											  
Principal Scientist, Information Sciences Institute
											  
Research Team Lead Information Sciences Institute
											  
Research Lead Information Sciences Institute												  
Keston Researcher in Residence, Information Sciences Institute
											
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 2017-
											  
Research Consultant, Data, Discovery, Decisions Data Science Center
											
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 2016-2017
											  
Postdoctoral Researcher, Jack Baskin School of Engineering
											
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 2016
												
Lecturer, Technology and Information Management
											
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 2010-2016
												
Graduate Research Assistant, Artificial Intelligence
											
Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, 2014
												
Research Intern, Knowledge Vault Team
											
LinkedIn Corp., Mountain View, CA, 2012
												
Data Science Intern, Skills Team
											
Yahoo! Inc., (remote), 2010-2012
												
Data Scientist, Yahoo! Mail Antispam
											
Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, 2006-2010
												
Senior Software Engineer, Yahoo! Mail Antispam
											
Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, CA, 2005-2006
												
Software Engineer, Business Intelligence
											
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2004
												
Graduate Research Assistant, Machine Learning
											
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 2003
												
Research Programmer, Learning R&D Center
											
Internal Drive Corp., Stanford, CA, 2002
												
Camp Instructor, Game Programming & C++
											
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2001
												
Research Programmer, Robotics Institute