I am an associate professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, where I work on and teach machine learning, natural language processing and AI. I co-lead the Utah NLP group.
Previous affiliations
Before Utah, I was a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University at the Stanford NLP group (2013-14) and received my Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013. During my sabbatical year in 2022, I was a visiting research scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Leadership roles
I have served in leadership positions for major conferences: ACL 2024 (program co-chair), CoNLL 2022 (program co-chair) and AAAI 2022 (associate program chair).
I am currently the associate director for AI outreach of the Kahlert School of Computing. Previously, I have directed the Utah Center for Data Science (2023–2024) and the Utah Data Science Certificate Program (2018–2021).
Recently, Sneha Kasera and I co-created the Faculty Upskilling in AI (U-AI) Program, which is a university-wide program to help faculty incorporate AI in research. In the past I have organized the Utah Data Science Day multiple times.
Awards & Recognition
My research has been recognized with best paper awards at EMNLP 2014 (“Modeling Biological Processes for Reading Comprehension”) and CoNLL 2019 (“On the Limits of Learning to Actively Learn Semantic Representations”, honorable mention). Our work on learning distributed representations for structured output prediction was selected as a NeurIPS 2014 spotlight (top 3.7% of submissions). Our paper on the ISAAC neural network accelerator from ISCA 2016 was picked as one of IEEE Micro Top Picks for the year.
I have also received industry and teaching recognition through the Google Faculty Award (2018) and Verisk AI Faculty Research Award (2020-22), and multiple dean’s teaching commendations for my machine learning and structured prediction classes.