Jeff Heflin

Jeff Heflin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University, and Director of the Cognitive Science Program. He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.S. from The College of William and Mary. His research focuses on AI for Data Management, Scalable Reasoning, and Data Exploration, with significant contributions to Semantic Web technologies like SHOE, DAML+OIL, and OWL.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Maryland, 2001
• M.S. in Computer Science, University of Maryland, 1999
• B.S. in Computer Science, The College of William and Mary, 1992

Research Interests: Heflin’s work advances Semantic Web infrastructure, including ontology development, scalable reasoning systems, and data integration. His contributions include foundational benchmarks like LUBM and innovations in entity matching (DAME), table search (StruBERT), and neural-augmented logical reasoning.

Awards:

• Winner of the Billion Triple Challenge (ISWC 2012)
• Best Paper Award, ISWC 2004
• Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching (2017)

Service & Leadership: Served as Vice-President of the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), Editorial Board member of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, and General Chair of ISWC 2017. Active in conference organization (CIKM 2020, COLING 2022) and journal special issues on Semantic Web evaluation.

Labs & Collaborations: Leads the Semantic Web and Agent Technologies (SWAT) Lab at Lehigh, focusing on AI-driven data management and scalable reasoning systems. Collaborates on NSF-funded projects like CRISPS (cell-centric image similarity search) and Domain-Agnostic Dataset Search.