Summary
Hi! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I am part of the Text Information Management and Analysis Group. My advisor is Prof. ChengXiang Zhai.
My general research interests are at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Privacy/Security. My research focuses on modeling and understanding abusive user behavior on social media and underground forums, especially related to textual user data. To fight this abuse, I build ML systems that measure, monitor and mitigate illicit user activity. For example, I created the DarkJargon.net online resource for understanding underground communication with latent meaning.
As part of my research journey I have published work in text classification and retrieval, domain-adaptation, personalization, information extraction and knowledge bases.
Publications
Education
August 2016 – 2021 (tentative):
Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
April 2013 – October 2015:
M.Sc. in Computer Science at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
October 2009 – February 2013:
B.Sc. in Applied Computer Science at University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Germany
Research Experience
May 2020 – September 2020:
Google
Research Intern – Applied Privacy Research
May 2019 – May 2020:
Regology
Researcher (part-time) – Machine Learning and NLP
May 2018 – August 2018:
Baidu Research USA
Research Intern – Big Data Lab
May 2017 – December 2017:
IBM Research
Research Intern – Cognitive User Experience Lab
June 2013 – June 2016:
Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Research Assistant – Databases and Information Systems Department
Teaching Experience
Spring 2018:
CS 410: Text Information Systems (Prof. ChengXiang Zhai)
Teaching Assistant
Fall 2017:
CS 510: Advanced Information Retrieval (Prof. ChengXiang Zhai)
Teaching Assistant
Reviewer
2021: Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)
2020: ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) (Program Committee)
2020: ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)
2019 & 2020: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
2018 & 2019: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
2017 & 2018: Semantic Web journal
Honors and Awards
2020:
SIGIR Travel Grant (awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery)
2017:
SIGIR Travel Grant (awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery)
2016:
Computer Science Excellence Fellowship (awarded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)