Razvan Bunescu

Razvan Bunescu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), affiliated with the College of Computing and Informatics. His research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, music information retrieval, and computational creativity. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and M.S./B.S. degrees from the University Politehnica of Bucharest. His work is funded by NIH (1R21EB022356) and NSF (1117489) grants, emphasizing diabetes management through wearable sensor data and blood glucose prediction models.

Key research initiatives include the SmartHealth Lab, developing machine learning tools for healthcare, such as the OhioT1DM dataset for blood glucose prediction. He has co-chaired conferences like the Blood Glucose Level Prediction Challenge (BGLP) and served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers. Notable awards include a Best Paper Award at the 2024 Figurative Language Processing Workshop.

• Education:
  • Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin (2007)
  • M.S. Computer Science, University Politehnica of Bucharest (1999)
  • B.S. Computer Science, University Politehnica of Bucharest (1998)
• Professional Activities:
  • Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Computers (2024–25)
  • Program Co-Chair, International Summer School on Data Science (2018–24)
  • Area Chair, ACL 2020 NLP Applications Track
• Awards: Best Paper Award at FigLang 2024.
• Grants:
  • NIH R21EB022356: Adaptive Prediction of Blood Glucose Levels (2016–2020)
  • NSF 1117489: Machine Learning for Blood Glucose Prediction (2011–2016)
• Advising: Supervised 20+ students, including PhD candidates Erfan Al-Hossami and Mika Chen.

His lab’s work on blood glucose prediction has led to open-source tools like LSTM and ARIMA models, and datasets such as OhioT1DM. Current research explores creative AI, recommender systems, and hardware optimization.