Short Bio
I am a tenure‑track Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Systems, jointly appointed in the UW Graduate School and the Tacoma School of Engineering & Technology at the University of Washington, and hold an adjunct appointment with the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC). I direct the Multi‑Foundation Model Lab (MF‑Lab), advise Ph.D. students in the Computer Science & Systems Ph.D. program, and since June 2025 have served as a Research Scientist with the Meta AI AGI team. My work in Multimodal Generative AI, Embodied / Robotic Intelligence, and Intelligent Transportation has appeared in CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI and ACM MM, and powered The Washington Post investigations that earned the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Prior to UW I spent seven years at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, rising from Research Associate and Post‑doc to Project Scientist / Instructor under the mentorship of Prof. Alexander G. Hauptmann and Prof. Teruko Mitamura, and collaborating closely with Prof. David R. Mortensen (KAIROS TA‑1 & Eratosthenes backend), and Prof. Alan W. Black (KAIROS TA‑2). I served as technical lead for DARPA KAIROS and KAIROS‑Plus Projects, and contributed to IARPA DIVA and NIST PSIAP Projects. Earlier, I completed research internships at Alibaba DAMO Academy, Google Brain, and Microsoft Research; and received the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, IBM Outstanding Student Scholarship and Huawei Scholarship.
My research has been featured by The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News and other outlets, influencing public‑service reporting, safety analytics and mobility policy. Interested in joining? If you are excited about multimodal generation & reasoning, embodied AI, or large‑scale streaming perception, please email me—motivated students, post‑docs and collaborators are always welcome.