I am an assistant professor at Northeastern University, jointly appointed by ECE and Khoury Computer Science. I work on Natural Language Processing, Conversational AI, and AI safety. My research vision is to build a natural interface between human intelligence and machine intelligence via natural conversations, so that all members of society can interact with AI models seamlessly and safely.
Research Overview
I study how to build chatbots, how to break chatbots. I also work on AI-driven persuasion.- Persuade humans for social good: PersuasionForGood, Anti-scam Chatbot, Movie Recommendation, Cicero
- Persuade AI to study AI safety: Persuasive Jailbreaker, Persuasive Misinformation
- Understand AI's societal impact: Donation Persuasion, CultureBank
- Task-oriented and open-domain conversational AI: Learning through interaction, User sentiment adaptation
- Privacy in AI: Selective Differential Privacy, PrivacyLens
About Me
- Assistant Professor, ECE & CS, Northeastern University, Present
- Postdoc, Stanford NLP, Stanford University, 2024
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Columbia University, 2023
- Data Scientist, [24]7.ai, 2018
- M.A. in Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, 2016
- B.S. in Mathematics, Remin University of China, 2015
Awards/Honors
- MIT Tech Review 35 Innovators under 35, 2024
- Best Social Impact Paper, ACL 2024
- Outstanding Paper, ACL 2024
- Rising Stars in EECS, 2023
- Rising Stars in Machine Learning, 2022
- Best Paper Nomination, ACL 2019
- Dean's Distinguished PhD Fellowship
- Department Citation (top 1), UC Berkeley, 2016
- Speaker at Department Commencement (top 1), UC Berkeley, 2016
Recent Service
- Area Chair, NAACL 2025
- Area Chair, EMNLP 2024
- Area Chair, ACL 2024
- Area Chair, NAACL 2024
- Area Chair, EMNLP 2023
- Area Chair, 17th Women in Machine Learning Workshop (WiML 2022)
- Workshop Organizer: Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations, ACL 2023 & EMNLP 2024
- Workshop Organizer: Workshop for Conversational AI, ACL 2022