Social Sensing & Intelligence Lab

Faculty

Dr. Dong Wang

Director

Dr. Wang is an associate professor with tenure in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at UIUC. He is also affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, the Informatics Program, the Information Trust Institute, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), and the Center for Social and Behavioral Science (CSBS) at UIUC. His research interests mainly lie in the area of social (human-centric) sensing, intelligence and computing, human-centered AI, AI for social good, data quality, and big data analytics. Dr Wang and his team's work has been applied in a wide range of real-world applications such as misinformation detection, social network analysis, crowd-based disaster response, intelligent transportation, urban planning, and environment monitoring. He has published over 180 technical papers in peer reviewed conferences and journals. His research on social sensing, intelligence and computing resulted in software tools that found applications in academia, industry, and government research labs. He authored two books: "Social Edge Computing: Empowering Human-Centric Edge Computing, Learning and Intelligence" published by Springer and "Social Sensing: Building Reliable Systems on Unreliable Data" published by Elsevier. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award, Google Faculty Research Award, Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the US Army Research Office, Wing Kai Cheng Fellowship from the University of Illinois, the Best Paper Award of 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), the Best Paper Award of 16th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) and the Best Paper Honorable Mention of 8th IEEE SmartComp.

Senior Researcher

Yang Zhang

Senior Researcher

Yang Zhang is currently a teaching assistant professor at School of Information Sciences at UIUC. He is also a senior researcher in Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab. He received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He received his M.S. in Data Science from Indiana University-Bloomington. Before that, he attained his B.S. in Software Engineering from Wuhan University. His research interests focus on the human-centered AI, crowd-AI collaboration, deep learning and estimation theory. Yang has published 50+ peer-reviewed conference/journal papers, including 31 first-authored ones. These papers were published in top sensing systems, big data and social media venues such as ACM CSCW, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI, IEEE BigData, ACM/IEEE ASONAM, AAAI Hcomp, IEEE TBD, IEEE TCSS, ACM/IEEE IWQoS, IEEE SECON, Elsevier KBS. Yang is also the recipient of the most prestigious award - Outstanding Graduate Research Award at the University of Notre Dame and the W. J. Cody Research Associates at Argonne National Laboratory.

PhD Students

Huimin Zeng

PhD Student

Huimin Zeng is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He received his M.S. in Robotics, Cognition and Intelligence from Technical University of Munich. Prior to that, he got his bachelor’s degree in Robotics and Automation from Tongji University. His research interest lies in the intersection of social sensing and adversarial machine learning. He has published several first-author papers in top AI and social media venues such as IJCAI, ACM CIKM, ACM SIGIR, NAACL, ASONAM, IEEE BigData, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC).

Zhenrui Yue

PhD Student

Zhenrui Yue is an Informatics Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He received his B.S in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Robotics, Cognition and Intelligence from the Technical University of Munich. His research works focus on using AI to solve real-world challenges in language understanding, recommender system and adversarial machine learning. He has published several first-author papers in top recommender systems, NLP, and knowledge systems venues such as ACL, NAACL, ACM Recsys, ACM CIKM, ACM WSDM, COLING, EMNLP.

Ruohan Zong

PhD Student

Ruohan Zong is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. She received an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.E. in Computer Science and Technology from Sichuan University. Her primary research interests are human-centered AI and AI for social good. Ruohan is the recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship at UIUC. at UIUC. She published first-author papers in the top venues of ACM Web Conference (WWW 23) and AAAI HComp 23 in her first year.

YeonJung (Jessica) Choi

PhD Student

YeonJung (Jessica) Choi is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. She received her M.S. in Digital Analytics and B.A. in Quantitative Risk Management from Yonsei University. Her research mainly focuses on misinformation detection and algorithmic bias.

YeaEun Gong

PhD Student

YeaEun Gong is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. She received her M.S. in Cognitive Science from Seoul National University and B.A. in Psychology from Yonsei University. Her research interests center around human-Centered AI and human-AI Interaction. She published a first-author paper in the top venue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) in her first year.

Yifan Liu

PhD Student

Yifan Liu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and BSc in Computer Science from University College London. His research interest lies in the field of human-centered AI and human-in-the-loop learning. He published a first-author paper in the top venue of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2024) in his first year.

Yaokun Liu

PhD Student

Yaokun Liu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. She received an M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from Tianjin University and a B.E. in Intelligence Science and Technology from the University of Science and Technology Beijing. Her primary research interest lies in recommender systems. Yaokun is the recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship at UIUC. She has published several first-author papers in top recommender system venues such as Recsys and WSDM.

Zelin Li

PhD Student

Zelin Li is an Informatics Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He received his B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Electronic Science from the Southern University of Science and Technology. His research interests focus on privacy and fairness problems of applying generative models. Zelin is the recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship at UIUC. He has published a first-author paper in top AI conference IJCAI.

Ruichen Yao

PhD Student

Ruichen Yao is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He received his M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia. His research mainly focusses on human-centered AI and trustworthy machine learning.

Alumni

Daniel Zhang

Amazon Senior Research Scientist

Daniel (Yue) Zhang is currently a senior research scientist at Amazon's GAI. He received the PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. His research area lies in the intersection of machine learning/artificial intelligence, edge computing, and human-in-the-loop systems. Daniel has published 50+ peer-reviewed conference/journal papers, including 23 first-authored ones. These papers were published in both top machine learning and top systems venues such as AAAI, RTSS, INFOCOM, ICDCS, RTAS, SEC, IoTDI, KBS, BigData, ASONAM. Daniel is also the recipient of two of the most prestigious awards - Outstanding Graduate Research Award and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award at the University of Notre Dame. He was offered IBM Social Good Fellowship in 2020.

Yang Zhang

Teaching Assistant Professor at UIUC

Md Tahmid Rashid

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) at Illinois State University

Tahmid is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Illinois State University. He received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. He got his B.S. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from BRAC University, Bangladesh. His research centers on the unification of physical and cyber realms, otherwise known as cyber-physical systems. He aims to develop systems that will harness information from the social and physical worlds to solve some of the critical challenges in sensing, disaster response and situation awareness. Tahmid has published 20+ peer-reviewed conference/journal papers, including 13 first-authored ones. These papers were published in top sensing systems, IoT and CPS venues such as IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE RTSS, ACM/IEEE IoTDI, IEEE SECON, IEEE TCSS, ACM Collective Intelligence, Springer AIRE.

Lanyu Shang

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) at Loyola Marymount University

Lanyu Shang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University. She received her Ph.D. degree from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Prof. Dong Wang. She received an M.S. in Data Science from New York University and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research interest primarily lies in online misinformation detection using social media data. Lanyu has published 30+ peer-reviewed conference/journal papers, including 18 first-authored ones. These papers were published in top big data, information systems, and social network venues such as ICWSM, IEEE BigData, ACM/IEEE ASONAM, ACM Web Science, ICWSM, ACM/IEEE IWQoS, IEEE TBD, Elsevier KBS, IPM. Lanyu is also the recipient of the most prestigious award - Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award at the University of Notre Dame, the Best Paper Award at ACM/IEEE ASONAM 2022, and the Best Paper Honorable Mention at IEEE SmartComp 2022.

Master and Undergrad Researchers

Candice Chen (Master Student, UIUC)
Siyu Duan (Master Student, UIUC)
Jiawei Deng (Master Student, UIUC)
Augustine Xu (Master Student, UIUC)
Justin Xiao (Undergraduate Student, UIUC)
Ruozhen Yang (Undergraduate Student, UIUC)
Yike Li (Undergraduate Student, UIUC)
Thomas Plummer (Undergraduate Student, ND)
James Dong (Undergraduate Student, ND)
Jose Badilla (Undergraduate Student, ND)
Brian Mann (Undergraduate Student, ND)
Steven Mike (Undergraduate Student, ND)
Ben Cunning (Undergraduate Student, ND)
Herman Tong (Undergraduate Student, ND)
Yiwen Lu (Undergraduate Student, Tshinghua University)