About Me

I'm a faculty member in the University Libraries and School of Information Studies at Purdue, with a joint appointment in Applied and Creative Computing. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I use AI to tackle real-world problems, and over the past few years I've had the luck of mentoring a bunch of really sharp, hardworking students. Sometimes they even listen to me. Outside of work, I'm into soccer and tennis (NTRP 3.0-3.5), and I've got two cats, Tiger (小虎) and Meimei (妹妹), who keep the house lively.

Research Interests

My work is in Applied AI, mostly about the post-training and adaptation of foundation models. I've worked on vision, robotics, medicine, reasoning, and science problems. I'm especially interested in getting AI to work with hard-to-reach knowledge, the kind that's one-of-a-kind, restricted, and rarely written down more than once. The goal is to make these models genuinely useful and reliable in places where mistakes are costly. Two questions drive most of my work.

How can we adapt large models efficiently? I work on post-training methods, like parameter-efficient fine-tuning, prompt and representation tuning, and model fusion, that let a pretrained model pick up new tasks with very little data and compute, and few trainable parameters.

How can we make them reliable in the real world? I build robust, multimodal systems using fast-and-slow reasoning, calibration, and safety methods, so they stay dependable under distribution shift and adversarial conditions, and hold up when they're used for decisions that matter.

Prospective Students

I take one incoming PhD student every year. Before making a funded offer, I usually start with a 4-6 month internship working alongside one of my senior PhD students, a low-pressure way for both of us to see whether it's a good fit. Once you join, I treat my student as an apprentice. We'll work side by side, talking through problems and publishing together, and when you're ready I'll help send you off to a strong next step. At the same time, I count on you to be independent enough to take problems on and move them forward on your own. As an advisor, I'm demanding most of the time and short-tempered periodically, but I'm working on it.

Alumni

Services

  • Area Chair: The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026-
  • Area Chair: The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023-
  • Senior PC: The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2023-
  • Senior PC: The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023-
  • Associate editor: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2023-
  • Associate editor: Neurocomputing, 2024-
  • Associate editor: ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation (JATS), 2023-

Publications

For my full list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar