xiangren [at] usc.edu
Assistant Professor, USC Computer Science
Research Team Leader, USC ISI
Director, USC INK Research Lab
Information Director, SIGKDD
Forbes' Asia 30 Under 30
Natural Language Processing,
Machine Learning, Knowledge Graph
I'm an Assistant Professor at USC in Computer Science and a Research Team Leader in Information Sciences Institute (ISI). I'm a member of the USC NLP Group, USC Machine Learning Center and ISI Center on Knowledge Graphs. At USC CS I'm the PI of the Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Research Lab. Previously I was a Data Science Advisor at Snapchat. Prior to USC, I did my PhD work in computer science at UIUC. I've also spent time with the NLP group and the SNAP group at the Stanford University.
I work on new algorithms and datasets in natural language processing and machine learning to make our AI systems cheaper (less labeled data), transparent (explainability) and reliable (incorporating human knowledge, constraints, and decision rationales). My group (INK Lab) focuses on developing label-efficient, prior-informed models that extract machine-actionable knowledge from natural language data, perform neural-symbolic knowledge reasoning for intelligent applications, and learning (to adapt and improve) from human explanations and instructions. Please check out the our group website for more information.
A summary of my PhD work on label-efficient NLP can be found in the book "Mining Structures of Factual Knowledge from Text: An Effort-Light Approach". Our research work is funded by NSF (CAREER award, SciSIP #1829268), DARPA (MCS, INCAS, SCORE, GAILA, SAIL-ON), IARPA (BETTER, SAGE), and gift awards from industry partners including Google, Amazon, JP Morgan, Adobe, Sony, and Snapchat.