Prospective Students: at USC & interested in research positions?  

News

Spring 2021
Pre-print of our work on Biases in Common Sense KGs with Nina and Pei on arXiv
Pre-print of our work on Probing for Common Sense with Pei on arXiv
Pre-print of our forthcoming NAACL paper on Numbers in NLP with Avi available
Winter 2021
I'm now Director of the Center on Knowledge Graphs at ISI!
Paper on Pre-trained Embeddings for Tables with Majid Ghasemi Gol published in KAIS
Paper on Hybrid Models for Table Understanding with Kexuan Sun published at AAAI 2021
Fall 2020
Focused Research Award from Google on Recommendation Dialogues with Lise Getoor and William Wang to build hybrid models for dialogues and data!
Paper on Personzalized Explanations for Recommendations (with Pigi Kouki) published in ACM TIIS
Newly funded VENICE project (DARPA Habitus seeks to build KGs for cultural attitudes and knowledge Our MACROSCORE project on Scoring Scientific Research renewed by DARPA through 2022

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 Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Research Lead & 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