I lead Infolab at WPI. My primary research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and social computing, over large-scale systems like the Web and social media. I focus on threats to these systems and design methods to mitigate negative behaviors (e.g., misinformation, hate speech), and look for positive opportunities to mine and analyze these systems for developing next generation algorithms and architectures (e.g., recommender system, natural language understanding). I also focus on AI for social good (e.g., disrupting wildlife trafficking networks).

News: Open Position for prospective PhD students

Teaching (full list)

• CS547/DS547 Information Retrieval, Fall 2024

Selected Recent Publications (full list)

• Context-Aware Diffusion-based Sequential Recommendation, BigData 2024
• ID and Graph View Contrastive Learning with Multi-View Attention Fusion for Sequential Recommendation, BigData 2024
• Let's Ask GNN: Empowering Large Language Model for Graph In-Context Learning, EMNLP Findings 2024
• Contrastive Learning with Auxiliary User Detection for Identifying Activities, ICMLA 2024
• Empowering Large Language Models for Textual Data Augmentation, ACL Findings 2024
• Wildlife Product Trading in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Ivory-Related Product Sales Promotion Posts, ICWSM 2024
• MEND: Meta Demonstration Distillation for Efficient and Effective In-Context Learning, ICLR 2024
• Alleviating Confounding Effects with Contrastive Learning in Recommendation, ECIR 2024
• GRENADE: Graph-Centric Language Model for Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Text-Attributed Graphs, EMNLP Findings 2023
• KEPLET: Knowledge-Enhanced Pretrained Language Model with Topic Entity Awareness, EMNLP Findings 2023
• Deep Heterogeneous Contrastive Hyper-Graph Learning for In-the-Wild Context-Aware Human Activity Recognition, IMWUT, December 2023
• What Boosts Fake News Dissemination on Social Media? A Causal Inference View, PAKDD 2023
• Heterogeneous Hyper-Graph Neural Networks for Context-aware Human Activity Recognition, PerCom 2023
• Toward Designing Effective Warning Labels for Health Misinformation on Social Media, HICSS 2023
• Multi-Behavior Recommendation with Hyperbolic Geometry, BigData 2022
• Energy-based Domain Adaption with Active Learning for Emerging Misinformation Detection, BigData 2022
• Extracting and Visualizing Wildlife Trafficking Events from Wildlife Trafficking Reports, ASONAM 2022
• Reducing and Exploiting Data Augmentation Noise through Meta Reweighting Contrastive Learning for Text Classification. BigData 2021
• An Effective, Robust and Fairness-aware Hate Speech Detection Framework. BigData 2021
• Multi-Source Domain Adaptation with Weak Supervision for Early Fake News Detection. BigData 2021
• Hierarchical Multi-head Attentive Network for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection. EACL 2021.
• Popularity versus quality: analyzing and predicting the success of highly rated crowdfunded projects on Amazon. Computing 2021.
• Where are the Facts? Searching for Fact-checked Information to Alleviate the Spread of Fake News. EMNLP 2020.
• HABERTOR: An Efficient and Effective Deep Hatespeech Detector. EMNLP 2020.
• Hierarchical Evidence Set Modeling for Automated Fact Extraction and Verification. EMNLP 2020.
• SWE2: SubWord Enriched and Significant Word Emphasized Framework for Hate Speech Detection. CIKM 2020.
• Quaternion-based self-Attentive Long Short-term User Preference Encoding for Recommendation. CIKM 2020.
• Malicious Bot Detection in Online Social Networks: Arming Handcrafted Features with Deep Learning. SocInfo 2020.

Recent Professional Activities (full list)

• Program committee member: WSDM 2025, ACL 2024, SIGIR 2024, WSDM 2024, ACL 2023, SIGIR 2023, WSDM 2023, KDD 2022, SIGIR 2022, TheWebConf 2022, DeMaL 2021, SIGIR 2021, AAAI 2021, TheWebConf 2021, WSDM 2021
• Senior program committee member: WebSci 2025, AAAI 2025, ICWSM 2025, AAAI 2024, ICWSM 2024, ICWSM 2023, AAAI 2023, ICWSM 2022, ICWSM 2021
• Conference Organization: WSDM 2020 (Cup Chair), JCDL 2015 (Poster and Demo Chair)
• Tutorial: Social Media Threats and Countermeasures at ICWSM 2014, Social Spam, Campaigns, Misinformation and Crowdturfing at WWW 2014
• Journal Reviewer: ACM TIST, ACM TKDD, ACM TOIS, ACM TWEB, ACM TOIT, ACM TISSEC, ACM TIIS, ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TPDS, IEEE Pervasive Computing, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE/ACM TON, Springer SNAM, Springer Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Springer GeoInformatica, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems

Honors and Awards

• Nominee for Outstanding Academic Advisor of the Year, WPI, 2024
• Test of Time Award - Honorable Mention, SIGIR, 2022
• Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellow, 2022
• Test of Time Award, CIKM, 2020
• Nominee for Outstanding Academic Advisor of the Year, WPI, 2019
• Best Reviewer, ICWSM, 2019
• WPI Recognition of Faculty Achievement, 2018
• USU CS Faculty Research Award, 2017
• NSF CAREER Award, 2016 [Project Page]
• USU CS Faculty Service Award, 2016
• Best Paper Nominee, ACM IUI, 2014
• Google Faculty Research Award, 2013