ChengXiang Zhai

ChengXiang Zhai is the Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, holding appointments in the Department of Computer Science, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the Department of Statistics. He leads research in intelligent information systems, with a focus on information retrieval, data mining, NLP, and machine learning.

His TIMAN research group and DAIS explore applications in healthcare, education, and scientific discovery. He develops MOOCs on text retrieval and mining, and has published extensively on topics including LLM alignment, user simulation, and multimodal systems.

• Key Research Areas: Intelligent search engines, explainable AI, human-AI collaboration, biomedical informatics
• Recent Trends: LLM economics, knowledge overshadowing, just-in-time recommendation systems

He has received the ACM Fellow title, SIGIR Salton Award, and multiple teaching honors including Rose Award and Graduate Mentoring Award. He serves as series editor for Springer Information Retrieval Book Series.