I am currently a Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research and an incoming Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department in Stony Brook University (SUNY).Previously I was a PhD student in Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University.

Prospective PhD students: Click here

My research interests are broadly in AI, NLP and Human AI Interaction and my goal is to design and build reliable AI systems that can handle implicature and ambiguity, understand human behavior and are aligned with the requirements humans have from technology. Some of the research directions I am very excited about:

1) Long Form Text Generation Evaluation: How can we design better ways to evaluate long-form text generation by drawing on technical skills from computer science and design in combination with other disciplines, including the humanities, to expand the communities?

2) Evaluation for Reasoning and Explanability: How can we build good evaluations that facilitate both understanding and explainability of complex reasoning patterns in both language ( [1],[2] ) and vision.

3) Design for Human AI Alignment: Todays powerful AI systems are supported by RLHF which converts human feedback/preferences to meaninful training signal. For complex tasks this is a fundamental bottlenck as feedback can be inherently noisy. How can we design better ways to elicit human feedback that improve alignnment?

4) Human AI Collaboration: AI technologies, created by humans and for humans, will increasingly shape future of workforce. How can we design better collaboration strategies and human computer interaction interfaces that understand user intention and preferences, and help them solve tasks efficiently.

Here is an live demo of how to improve AI generated writing from my recent paper

Here are some metaphoric illustrations from my previous paper

I sometimes (very rarely write autofiction / creative nonfiction). Here are some of them [1], [2], [3]

Media

• MIT Technology Review An AI script editor could help decide what films get made in Hollywood
• Bloomberg AI Has a Way to Go to Become A Connections Puzzle Champ
• MIT Technology Review AI can make you more creative—but it has limits
• MIT Technology Review Why artists are becoming less scared of AI?
• MIT Technology Review What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines?
• Washington Post Can you tell which of these break-up texts are AI-generated?
• The Hollywood Reporter Why AI Isn’t Funny — At Least Not Yet
• The New York Times R&D Generating Open-Ended Questions from News Articles

Recent News

• New paper quantifying and mitigating idiosyncracies in AI writing
• Paper on LLM and abstract reasoning accepted to EMNLP
• Area Chair at ACL 2024
• First author paper on Creativity Evaluation accepted to CHI 2024, Honolulu
• First author paper on Creativity Support with LLM accepted to Creativity and Cognition 2024, Chicago
• Tutorial on Creative Language Generation at EMNLP 2023 with Vishakh Padmakumar, He He, and Nanyun Peng.