Research Interests

Click any interest below to see the papers I've published in that area.

Theoretical Foundations
Probabilistic Graphical Models Approximate Posterior Inference Bayesian Nonparametric Statistics Probabilistic Topic Modeling
Domain Applications
Web Search & Information Retrieval Natural Language Processing Social Networks & Urban Human Computing Learning-to-Rank
Modern Architectures
Word Embeddings Deep Neural Networks Multi-modal Machine Learning
Work Experience
August 2024 - Present

Associate Professor (Teaching and Research)

University of Southampton, United Kingdom

May 2022 - July 2024

Lecturer (Teaching and Research)

University of Southampton, United Kingdom

Finalist: Vice Chancellor's Awards 2024 (Teaching)
January 2020 - April 2022

Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and AI

University of Essex, United Kingdom

Awarded: Outstanding Early-Career Researcher 2021
December 2017 - December 2019

Lecturer in Computing

University of Kent, United Kingdom

November 2014 - July 2015

Postdoctoral Fellow

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) / Microsoft Research Asia

Education
August 2009 - July 2014

Ph.D. in Information Systems

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Thesis: Latent Probabilistic Topic Discovery for Text Documents Incorporating Segment Structure and Word Order.

Finalist: Best Research Awards (entire Hong Kong)
September 2004 - July 2008

Bachelor of Technology in CSE

Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology (SMIT)

Ranked among top 10% | Superb (S) Grade Thesis
Invited Talks

A selection of invited lectures and panel appearances across academia and industry.

July 2019

Summer School Lecturer

Department of Intelligent Computing and Sensing Laboratory, Peking University, Beijing

The only academic selected from the entire UK/EU region — ahead of senior lecturers and professors nominated alongside me
  • ▹ 2025 — University of Sheffield, Panel Talk
  • ▹ 2023 — Thomson Reuters London Research Labs
  • ▹ 2023 — Thomson Reuters India Research Labs
  • ▹ 2022 — AACL Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) Panel Discussion Member
  • ▹ 2021 — BT AI Global Festival (Online)
  • ▹ DavisAI Seminar Talk
  • ▹ Invited talk on my GCRF project at CURE: Global Challenges (GCRF)
  • ▹ October 2018 — Digital Humanities Workshop, CHASE Group
  • ▹ October 2018 — BenevolentAI
  • ▹ March 2018 — Centre for Language and Linguistics, University of Kent (with Prof. Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow)
  • ▹ March 2018 — Dept. of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London
  • ▹ November 2017 — School of Mathematics, Cardiff University
  • ▹ December 2017 — SEEM Seminar Series, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • ▹ June 2017 — "Probabilistic Topic Models" Workshop Talk, School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University
Professional Service & Reviewing

Peer review and editorial service across the top venues in AI, NLP, and information retrieval.

19 Journals Reviewed
24 Programme Committee Venues
3 Reviewer Distinctions

Editorial Roles

  • ▹ Associate Editor: AI Communications
  • ▹ Guest Editor: IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems — Special Issue on Computational Social Systems for COVID-19 Emergency Management and Beyond (2020)
  • ▹ Guest Editor: Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics — Multi-scale Assessment of Research Priorities over Acknowledgement and Funding Data during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2022)

Senior Programme Committee

5 venues
+
ICASSP 2025 IJCNN 2025 ACL Rolling Review (ARR) 2025, 2026 ECAI 2023, 2024, 2025 AAAI 2024, 2025, 2026

Programme Committee Member

24 venues
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AICCSA 2014 HICSS 2015 RussIR 2016 WWW 2017, 2018 / WebConf 2024 SIGKDD 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 NAACL 2021 SIGIR 2017–2024 IJCAI 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024 CIKM 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024 UKCI 2017 COLING 2018, 2020 / LREC-COLING 2024 AAAI 2019, 2020, 2021 ECIR 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024 EMNLP 2019–2023 AACL-IJCNLP 2020, 2023 WSDM 2021, 2022, 2024 EACL 2021 ACL 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 NeurIPS 2022, 2023 ICML 2023, 2024 ECML-PKDD 2023 SDM 2024 SIGCHI 2024 ICLR 2021, 2022, 2024

External / Sub-Reviewer

9 venues, 2012–2017
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AAAI 2016, 2017 IJCAI 2015, 2016 CIKM 2016 WWW 2014, 2015 PAKDD 2015 SIGIR 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 ACL 2014 KDD 2013, 2014 ICDM 2013

Journal Reviewing

19 journals, 3 distinctions
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Transactions on the Web (TWEB) — Distinguished Review Board WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery — Reviewing Certificate Computer Speech & Language — Outstanding Reviewer Entropy Fuzzy Sets and Systems Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information Information Retrieval Journal The Computer Journal Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence Information Processing and Management (IP&M) Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) Neural Networks Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP) Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) Information — Reviewer Board Computational Linguistics — Reviewer Board IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems Artificial Intelligence Communications
Technical Skills
Programming & Scripting Languages
C C++ Python R MATLAB SED AWK Perl Linux Shell Scripting
Productivity & Tooling
LaTeX MS Office LibreOffice Vim
Operating Systems
Linux & variants Microsoft Windows Sun Solaris