The Discovery Analytics Center continually brings together computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians to meet the research and workforce needs of today’s data-driven society. This Fall, DAC welcomes new faculty member Lifu Huang. He has joined the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor, having earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Huang’s primary research interests are in the fields of natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is specifically interested in building efficient models and benchmarks that can encourage machines to perform human-level intelligence.

His current projects include extracting structured knowledge with limited supervision; natural langue understanding and reasoning; natural language generation and representation learning.

As a graduate student, he was a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia; IBM Watson Research; U.S. Army Research Center; and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where he was recipient of the 2019 AI2 Fellowship.

Huang received a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China, in 2011 and a master’s degree in computer science from Peking University in 2014.