Assistant Professor

Computer Science Department, Viterbi School of Engineering

I have been a faculty at USC since the August of 2008. Prior to joining USC, I was a postdoctoral researcher at U. of California (Berkeley) with Prof. Michael I. Jordan and Prof. Stuart Russell. I also spend a year at Yahoo! Research as a research scientist. I have a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in biomedical engineering from Southeast University (Nanjing, China). , and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of Prof. Lawrence K. Saul (now at UC San Diego)

My research focuses on the theory and application of machine learning. In the past, I have been working on a number of research projects including speech and object recognition, manifold learning and dimensionality reduction, optimization algorithms for large margin classifiers, and others.

Recently, I have been interested in applying machine learning techniques to understanding human perception and cognitive processes by modeling and analyzing brain imaging data. I have also been actively working on computer vision problems with my collaborators.

I was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow. I was also awarded an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award in 2012 and was a member of 2010 DARPA Computer Science Study Panel.