Wei Ai

Wei Ai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, affiliated with the College of Information (INFO) and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). His research focuses on data science for social good (DSSG), integrating machine learning, causal inference, and experimental design to address societal challenges in education, virtual collaboration, and quantum computing. He leads the Center for Educational Data Science and Innovation (EDSI) and has secured grants from the NSF, Gates Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation for projects like M-Powering Teachers and classroom quality assessment tools.

Education: PhD in Information from the University of Michigan (advised by Qiaozhu Mei). Previous academic roles include teaching at the University of Michigan and Peking University in courses like Data Mining and Information Retrieval.

Research Interests: Machine Learning and Causal Inference, AI for Education, Virtual Teams and Social Identity, Large Language Models for Social Applications. He has published in venues such as PNAS, Management Science, ACL, and the Web Conference.

• Grants: Major awards include a NSF grant on middle-grade math instruction analysis (with Min Sun) and a Gates Foundation grant for classroom dataset development (with Jing Liu).
• Labs/Teams: CLIP Lab member, collaborating on interdisciplinary projects with UMIACS and the Joint Quantum Institute.

Prospective students: Open to mentoring PhD students through INFO and Computer Science programs. Actively supervises current students in education technology and quantum computing domains.