Contact information
Phone: 217-244-6187
Email: spbhat 2 at illi nois dot edu
Address: 1308 W. Main St., Urbana, IL 61801 (322 CSL)
I am Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and am part of the Coordinated Science Laboratory. I am an affiliate faculty member in the department of Educational Psychology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Center for Social and Behavioral Science.
My research interests span the areas of natural language processing, human-computer interaction, learning analytics and biomedical language processing.
I am curious about finding ways to make language processing more natural. These include the design of computational methods to process idiosyncratic and creative linguistic phenomena that are inherent in natural language or biomedical language. A second component of my research is to direct advances in natural language processing (NLP) and data science towards enhancing user experience in human-technology interaction settings. In other words, I am interested in answering the following two different but broadly related questions: `How do we enable machines to understand the nuances of human language?’ and `How can we use advances in NLP and data science to enhance user experience in various scenarios of human-technology interaction?’
News
- Delighted to be part of the multi-organization, NSF-funded INVITE Institute to advance research of AI for education.
- Successfully piloted DIYA-India in summer 2023. Looking forward to watching it grow!
- I’m on leave from Illinois for the academic year 2022-2023.
- I’m honored to be selected to the campus-wide Spring 2022 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students! I continue to enjoy learning as a teacher.
- 12/2021: Our paper on processing idiomatic expressions with ways to paraphrase them into literal expressions will appear in AAAI 2022. Look out for the large dataset and the accompanying models!
- 10/2021: Excited to receive the Stemmler Medical Education Research Fund of the National Board of Medical Examiners to begin a collaboration with Dr. William Bond (Jump Simulation, Peoria) and Dr. Rachel Yudkowsky (University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine).
- 07/2021: I am honored to be the recipient of the 2021 ECE Ronald W. Pratt Faculty Outstanding Teaching Award.
- 07/2021: I am excited to serve on the organizing committee of the 2022 US FOE meeting organized by the National Academy of Engineering.
