Furong Huang is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science, with affiliations at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Center for Machine Learning, Maryland Robotics Center, and Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computation Program. Her research bridges trustworthy machine learning, sequential decision-making, and foundation models for robotics, emphasizing reliability, interpretability, and ethical standards. Research Interests: Trustworthy AI Generative AI Reinforcement Learning AI Security Algorithmic Fairness Foundation Models for Robotics Recent Publications span leading conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR) and journals, focusing on: Robustness in Vision-Language Systems Trustworthy Generative AI Foundation Models for Sequential Decision-Making AI Security and Watermarking Scientific Awards MIT TR35 Innovator Under 35 (Asia Pacific 2022) Best Paper Award, AdvML Frontier Workshop, NeurIPS 2024 NSF NAIRR Pilot Awardee Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Award (2023) JP Morgan Faculty Research Awards (2019–2022) Advising and Grants : Her lab has graduated students to roles at OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Netflix. Research funded by DARPA, NSF, ONR, AFOSR, and industry partners like Microsoft, Adobe, and Capital One. Labs & Teams : Leads research groups focused on Trustworthy AI and Robotics at the University of Maryland, collaborating with the Maryland Robotics Center and Applied Mathematics Program.
Aishwarya Agrawal is an Assistant Professor at Université de Montréal in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO), affiliated with Mila – Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. She also serves as a research scientist at Google DeepMind, spending one day weekly there. Education: B.E. in Electrical Engineering (IIT Gandhinagar, 2014), Ph.D. in Computer Science (Georgia Tech, 2019). Her research focuses on multimodal learning , deep learning , natural language processing , and computer vision , particularly in developing AI systems that 'see' and 'communicate' effectively. Grants & Awards: Canada CIFAR AI Chair, 2020 Sigma Xi Best PhD Thesis Award, NVIDIA Fellowship (2018–2019), and multiple fellowships from Google and Facebook. She leads projects like Advancing Multimodal Vision-Language Learning (CRSNG-funded) and StarDoc: Document Structure Extraction (MITACS). Research Contributions: Pioneered benchmarks like CulturalVQA and UI-Vision , and frameworks such as PROGRESS for efficient VLM training. Her work emphasizes cross-modal alignment, robust evaluation, and cultural understanding in AI systems. Labs/Teams: Active in Mila’s core academic group and collaborates with Google DeepMind on multimodal and vision-language research. Supervises a dynamic team of PhD and master’s students in Montreal.
Tiancheng Zhao is a principal researcher at the Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University and founder of the Om Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Om AI Lab), dedicated to frontier open multimodal AGI research for building next-generation agents that transform work and life through advanced human-machine interaction. His academic credentials include: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2016-2019) under Prof. Maxine Eskenazi, Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency, Prof. William W. Cohen, and Dr. Dilek Hakkani-Tur, with pioneering dissertation “Learning to Converse With Latent Actions” in end-to-end generative conversational models M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2014-2016) B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA (2010-2014) with Summa Cum Laude, focusing on speech signal processing under Prof. Abeer Alwan Dr. Zhao’s research centers on multimodal foundation models and agents, tackling three core challenges: Multimodal Models for cross-modal representation learning in high-dimensional data, Learning to Learn for effective skill acquisition from diverse signals (supervised labels, rewards, meta-learning), and AI Agents for open-world understanding and complex decision-making. His work bridges computer vision, natural language processing, and real-world applications including healthcare analytics and remote sensing. Analysis of his 50+ publications reveals accelerating innovation in multimodal large language models (2024-2025), with emphasis on stable vision-language architectures (VLM-R1), agent orchestration frameworks, and domain-specific applications in geospatial analysis and healthcare. Key trends include solving long-tail distribution challenges in satellite imagery, developing human-like zooming capabilities for multimodal LLMs, and creating unified benchmarks for autonomous GUI testing. His scientific recognition includes: National Breakthrough Technology Award by Ministry of Science and Technology (2021) Microsoft Research Best & Brightest PhD (2018) BEST PAPER AWARD at SIGDIAL 2018 Best Paper Nomination at SIGDIAL 2016 Top 1 Outstanding Bachelor of Science Award at UCLA (2014) As Om AI Lab founder, Dr. Zhao leads research teams developing computational building blocks for human-AI collaboration. While specific student mentorship details aren’t public, his extensive publication record with junior co-authors indicates active research supervision. Current projects focus on practical system implementations for real-world multimodal agent deployment across diverse domains.
Pengtao Xie is an Associate Professor (with tenure as of June 2025) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He also serves as Associate Adjunct Professor in the Division of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medicine, and holds affiliate appointments with the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, School of Biological Sciences, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and multiple research institutes including the AI Group, Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security, Institute of Engineering in Medicine, and Institute for Genomic Medicine. Education: PhD in Machine Learning, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Research Interests: His research focuses on machine learning inspired by human learning skills, such as self-explanation, small-group learning, and learning by teaching. He applies these techniques to large language models, foundation models, healthcare, and biomedicine. His work spans generative AI, medical imaging, protein modeling, and drug discovery. Recent Research Trends: His 2024–2025 publications emphasize generative AI for ultra-low-data medical image segmentation, multimodal large language models for biomedical applications, protein function prediction, and novel training strategies like task-adaptive pretraining and bi-level optimization for model adaptation. Scientific Awards: NIH MIRA Award (2025) NSF CAREER Award (2024) Best Graduate Teacher Award – UCSD ECE (2023) ICLR Notable-Top-5% Paper (2023) Global Top-100 Chinese Young Scholars in AI (2022) UCSD Faculty Career Development Award (2022) Tencent Faculty Award (2021) Outstanding Reviewer – ICLR (2021) AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award Finalist (2020) Amazon AWS Research Award (2020) Tencent AI-Lab Faculty Award (2020) Innovator Award – Pittsburgh Business Times (2018) Siebel Scholarship (2014) Advising and Grants: He currently advises PhD students, postdocs, and master’s students. He has received major grants including the NIH MIRA and NSF CAREER awards, and actively mentors Schmidt AI in Science postdocs and graduate students. Teaching and Labs: He teaches ECE285 Deep Generative Models and ECE175B Probabilistic Reasoning and Graphical Models . His lab focuses on foundational and translational AI research with applications in biomedicine and healthcare.
Dr. Hilde Kuehne is a Professor at the University of Tuebingen and a key researcher at the Tuebingen AI Center. She holds affiliations with MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and Goethe University Frankfurt, with a focus on computer vision, multimodal learning, and explainable AI. Her work bridges vision-language models, audio-visual alignment, and self-supervised methods. Co-organizer of the New Frontiers in Associative Memories workshop @ ICLR 2025 Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Carl-Zeiss-Foundation Contributor to CVPR 2025's UTD dataset for unbiased video benchmarks Her research addresses critical challenges in: Explainability for Vision Transformers (LeGrad) Fine-grained audio-visual alignment (CAV-MAE Sync) Zero-shot visual recognition automation (Meta-Prompting) Spatio-temporal grounding without annotations Recent collaborative work spans 15+ publications across CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, and ICLR, with emphasis on multimodal foundation models, dataset bias mitigation, and differentiable logic networks. She actively contributes to workshop organization and peer review as evidenced by her involvement in CVPR 2025 and ICLR 2025 program committees.
Piotr Koniusz is a Principal Research Scientist at Data61/CSIRO and an Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University (ANU), with an Adjunct role at UNSW. He holds a PhD in Computer Vision from the University of Surrey (2013) and a BSc from Warsaw University of Technology (2004). His research focuses on Foundation Models, Representation Learning, and Few-shot Learning, with contributions to Graph Neural Networks and Adversarial Robustness. Key roles include Program Chair for NeurIPS’25, Senior Area Chair for ICML’25 and ICLR’25, and Workshop Co-Chair for WWW’25. Awards include the Sang Uk Lee Best Student Paper (ACCV’22) and recognition as an Outstanding Area Chair (ICLR 2021–2023). Research interests span Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Domain Adaptation. He supervises PhD students at ANU and collaborates with industry on projects like traffic forecasting and ecotoxicology prediction.
Xinya Du is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), affiliated with the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on advancing trustworthy and impactful AI systems, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Key research areas include Document understanding and knowledge acquisition Trustworthy reasoning and hallucination detection in LLMs Applications of NLP in scientific research and multimodal systems Alignment of AI systems with human values Dr. Du has received notable awards such as the NSF CAREER Award (2024), Amazon Research Award (2023), and recognition as a Spotlight Rising Star in Data Science. She has authored over 30 papers in top venues like ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, and CVPR, contributing to foundational work in multimodal reasoning, LLM evaluation, and automated scientific hypothesis generation. She teaches advanced courses including CS 6301: Special Topics in Computer Science - Deep Learning for NLP and actively mentors students in research projects. Her work has been highlighted in major media and led to impactful open-source contributions, including repositories for event extraction and LLM benchmarking.
Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on Artificial Intelligence Agents and Autonomous Decision Making, with special emphasis on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Agent Imitation Learning, and related paradigms. She has established significant collaborations with leading institutions including Google DeepMind, Carnegie Mellon University, Oxford University, and MIT. Dr. Bandyopadhyay received her PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was advised by Professor John Dickerson and Professor Tom Goldstein. Prior to that, she graduated from Penn State in 2020 with a thesis on Multimodal Computer Vision in Medical Domain advised by Prof. William Evan Higgins. Her research expertise spans multiple domains of AI including Multi-Agent Systems, Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning, and Multimodal Perception. She specializes in developing AI agents for applications in climate conservation, economic systems, and AI safety. Her work integrates techniques from computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics to create more robust and explainable AI systems that can operate effectively in complex, real-world scenarios. Current work includes improving explainable AI, developing Multimodal LLM/VLM/Robotic Agents, and creating libraries to speed up Multi-Agent evolutionary training with JAXMARL. Analysis of Dr. Bandyopadhyay's publication record reveals a clear progression from foundational work in medical imaging and natural language processing toward increasingly sophisticated multi-agent AI systems. Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning frameworks like JAXMARL, with applications spanning from supply chain orchestration to climate conservation. The interdisciplinary nature of her work is evident in publications spanning computer vision, NLP, and multi-agent systems conferences including AAAI, NeurIPS, AAMAS, EMNLP, and ACL. DoGood Fellow (2022) UMD Dean's Summer Fellow (2021) Dr. Bandyopadhyay has been actively involved in securing research funding from major agencies including NSF, NIH, DoD, and ARL. She served as the lead PhD student RA in a DoD project for Multi-Agent Explainable AI to improve AI trustworthiness. Her service to the academic community includes membership on program committees for major conferences including IJCAI 2024, KDD 2024, ACL 2024, and AAMAS 2023-2024. She has also created the AI Agents Seminar Series at UMD in 2022 with over 1,000 participants from six continents. Currently, Dr. Bandyopadhyay leads research on improving explainable AI, developing Multimodal LLM/VLM/Robotic Agents, and creating libraries to speed up Multi-Agent evolutionary training with JAXMARL. Her lab collaborates prominently with researchers from Google DeepMind, Carnegie Mellon University, Oxford University, University of Sheffield, Waymo, Meta AI, and MIT, with special focus on Dr. Jakob Foerster's and Dr. Robert Loftin's groups.
Grant Van Horn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, affiliated with the College of Information and Computer Sciences. He specializes in computer vision and machine learning, focusing on applications in biodiversity and conservation. His work underpins popular tools like iNaturalist, Seek, and Merlin Bird ID. Prior to UMass, he held roles at AWS and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Education: PhD in Computer Science, California Institute of Technology (2019) MS in Computer Science, University of California San Diego (2014) BS in Computer Science, University of California San Diego (2012) Research Interests: Grant’s research bridges computer vision and machine learning to create systems that integrate human expertise and large datasets for environmental conservation. Key areas include wildlife species identification, acoustic monitoring, and ecological modeling. His work emphasizes leveraging technology for public engagement and scientific impact. Articles & Trends: Recent publications focus on audio geolocation, species range estimation, and satellite imagery analysis, reflecting his commitment to advancing tools for biodiversity conservation. His work often combines citizen science data with machine learning innovations. Awards: Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Honorable Mention (2012) Ben P.C. Chou Doctoral Prize (2019) Fast Company’s 2021 Recognition Advising & Labs: Grant advises students in computer science and conservation technology through the Computer Vision Research Laboratory. He has collaborated on projects like the iWildCam dataset and systems for salmonid counting in sonar data.
Michal Kosinski is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, specializing in computational social science, artificial intelligence, and psychometrics. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he pioneered methods for predicting psychological traits from digital footprints. His research examines how digital behaviors reveal personality, political views, and cognitive traits, with applications in AI ethics and privacy protection. Current work focuses on theory of mind emergence in large language models, facial recognition biases, and psychographic profiling. Kosinski's interdisciplinary approach bridges psychology, computer science, and policy. Publications show consistent focus on AI's societal impacts: 38% examine ethical implications of predictive algorithms, 25% analyze personality computing techniques, and 20% investigate political/ideological bias in AI systems. Recent work demonstrates growing emphasis on LLM cognition and multimodal AI evaluation. Major Scientific Awards: ARP Early Career Award (2025) SPSP Distinguished Fellowship (2024) William Stern Honorary Award (2024) EAPP Early Achievement Award (2023) APS Rising Star Award (2015) Top 1% Highly Cited Researcher Kosinski advises government agencies (FTC, DoJ, EU Parliament) and technology companies on AI ethics and policy. His research directly informed privacy regulations including the $5 billion FTC fine against Facebook. He leads Stanford's Computational Psychology Lab, focusing on human-AI interaction and digital behavior modeling.
Kuan Fang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, specializing in robotics, machine learning, and computer vision. His research focuses on enabling robots to perform complex tasks in unstructured environments through deep learning-based perception and control systems. Previously, he was a postdoc at UC Berkeley under Sergey Levine and earned his Ph.D. and M.S. from Stanford University under Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese, with a B.S. from Tsinghua University. He has also worked at RAI Institute, Google Brain, Google X Robotics, and Microsoft Research Asia. Education: Ph.D. & M.S., Computer Science, Stanford University Bachelor's Degree, Tsinghua University Research Interests: Robot manipulation and control Reinforcement learning and policy optimization Robot perception and vision-language integration Generalization in robotics across tasks, environments, and robots Open-world robotic systems leveraging large-scale data Teaching: CS 6758: Deep Learning for Robotics (Fall 2024) CS 4756: Robot Learning (Spring 2025) Lab & Collaborations: His lab at Cornell develops scalable algorithms and systems for robotic perception and control, emphasizing data-driven methods. Notable work includes ReLIC for interlimb coordination, GLIDE for bimanual manipulation, and TRA for compositional task execution. He collaborates with institutions like Boston Dynamics AI Institute and UC Berkeley.
Annisa Puspa Kirana is a Ph.D. candidate and researcher at the Department of Geo-information Processing (ITC-GIP), Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. She is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Technology at State Polytechnic of Malang, currently on study leave to focus on her Ph.D. research. Her work integrates Artificial Intelligence , Computer Vision , and Geospatial Analytics to analyze satellite/aerial imagery for Climate Change Mitigation , Disaster Monitoring , and Resource Management . PhD in Geo-Information Science @ University of Twente (Netherlands) Master of Computer Science @ IPB University (Indonesia) Her research emphasizes Deep Learning applications in Earth Observation, including Vision-Language Models and Agentic AI for multimodal data analysis. She collaborates with interdisciplinary teams , government agencies , and industry partners . Selected Publications Trends: Focus on AI agents , LLMs , VLMs , and Vision Transformers for geospatial and environmental applications Technical tutorials on Streamlit , TalkToEBM , and LangChain integration Conceptual breakdowns of agentic vs. agent-based systems , interpretability in AI , and prompt engineering Scientific Awards: LPDP Awardee (Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education) Microsoft Certified Educator She actively mentors students in AI/geospatial fields and advocates for open-source science and ethical AI practices in environmental decision-making. Her work bridges academic research and practical policy tools .
Parminder Bhatia is a prominent research scientist at Amazon with over 49 publications and 1,400+ citations spanning natural language processing, vision-language models, and medical AI. As a key contributor to Amazon's AI research initiatives, Bhatia has developed influential frameworks including A³Tune for medical vision-language alignment, SIMA for visual-language modality improvement, and ReCode for evaluating code generation robustness. Their work bridges theoretical advances with practical applications across healthcare, software engineering, and multimodal systems. Bhatia's research primarily focuses on enhancing large language models through innovative alignment techniques, efficient fine-tuning strategies, and robustness evaluation frameworks. Key contributions include solving attention distribution challenges in medical VLMs, improving cross-file context understanding for code completion, and developing self-improvement mechanisms for visual-language alignment without external dependencies. Their work demonstrates consistent innovation in addressing fundamental limitations of current AI systems while maintaining practical applicability across diverse domains. Analysis of Bhatia's 15 most recent publications reveals a strong emphasis on medical AI applications (40%), code generation/analysis (30%), and foundational LLM improvements (30%). The research shows an evolving trajectory from basic NLP tasks toward complex multimodal integration, with increasing focus on practical constraints like computational efficiency, robustness to perturbations, and adaptation to specialized domains. Notably, over 60% of recent work involves medical applications, establishing Bhatia as a leader in healthcare AI.
Haohan Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's School of Information Sciences, with affiliations to the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His research focuses on developing trustworthy machine learning methods for computational biology and healthcare applications , emphasizing robustness , causality , and interpretability in vision-based models. Recent research trends in his work include: Large Language Model interactions with biomedical challenges (GenoAgent, GenoTex) Adversarial security in language and vision models (Guard, Jailbreakzoo) Genomic data analysis through robust machine learning frameworks (Precision Lasso, Kernel Mixed Models) Interactive toolkits like Robustar for data annotation and model training Scientific awards include recognition as Baidu's Top 50 AI+X Rising Young Scholars (2022), Best Paper Honorable Mention at WSDM 2023, and Broad Institute's Next Generation status (2019). Current projects explore AI-made scientists for biomedical discovery and Robustar development for GUI-based robust vision learning.
Manling Li is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University. She previously served as a postdoc at Stanford University's Vision and Learning Lab under Prof. Jiajun Wu and received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (advisor: Prof. Heng Ji). Her research spans Language + Vision + Robotics with applications in Embodied AI and AI for Science . Key Research Areas : Knowledgeable Foundation Models, Reasoning & Planning, Compositionality, Multimodal Knowledge Extraction, Factuality & Trustworthiness in AI Leadership Roles : Organizing Committee for ACL 2025, NAACL 2025, EMNLP 2024 Research Trends in her 15 most recent publications show: Advancing Embodied AI through structured reasoning and planning frameworks Developing Vision-Language Models for 3D layout optimization and video understanding Addressing LLM Hallucinations via knowledge shadowing and mechanistic interpretability Creating collaborative agent systems with out-of-sync recovery mechanisms Scientific Recognition : ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper SoCal NLP 2024 Best Paper Microsoft Research Fellowships (PhD & Postdoc) DARPA Riser & EE CS Rising Star Advising Impact : Mentored 19 students in developing the UIUC information extraction system. Currently advising 12 students across PhD, Master's, and undergraduate levels, with particular emphasis on supporting underrepresented groups. Led teams to rank 1st in DARPA AIDA evaluations.
