Alumni
2024
Shushan Arakelyan
Thesis Title: "Building Generalizable Language Models for Code Processing"
Advisor: Xiang Ren
Current Position: Research Scientist at Microsoft
Julie Jiang
Meryem M'hamdi
Thesis Title: Towards More Human-Like Cross-lingual Transfer Learning
Advisor: Jonathan May
Current Position: Applied and Data Scientist II at Microsoft
Myrl Marmarelis
Thesis Title: Robust Causal Inference with Machine Learning on Observational Data
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Post Doc at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Ehsan Qasemi
Thesis Title: Multi-Modal Preconditioned Inference of Commonsense Knowledge
Advisor: Muhao Chen
Current Position: Senior Member of Technical Staff @ Oracle ML
Kexuan Sun
Thesis Title: Advances in Understanding and Leveraging Structured Data for Knowledge-intensive Tasks
Advisor: Jay Pujara
Current position: Applied Scientist
Avijit Thawani
Thesis title: Aggregating Symbols in Language Models
Advisor: Jay Pujara
Current position: Research Assistant
Yilei Zeng
2023
Umang Gupta
Thesis Title: Controlling Information in Neural Networks for Fairness and Privacy
Advisor: Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Software Engineer at Google
Sarik Ghazarian Ghalemaleki
Thesis Title: Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Nanyun Peng
Current Position: Post Doctoral Scientist at Amazon
Hrayr Harutyunyan
Thesis Title: On Information Captured by Neural Networks: Connections With Memorization and Generalization
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Research Scientist at Google
Serban Stan
Thesis Title: Unsupervised Domain Adaption with Private Data
Advisor: Mohammad Rostami
Current Position: Machine Learning Scientist at Beyond Limits AI
2022
Sami Abu-El-Haija
Thesis Title: Fast and Label-Efficient Graph Representation Learing
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Sr. Research Scientist at Google Research
Nada Aldarrab
Thesis Title: Automatic Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts
Advisor: Jonathan May
Current Position: Assistant Professor at King Abdulaziz University
Robert Brekelmans
Thesis Title: Information Geometry of Annealing Paths for Inference and Estimation
Advisor: Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Post Doc at Vector Institute, Toronto
Nikolaos Flemotomos
Thesis Title: Extracting and Using Speaker Role Information in Speech Processing Applications
Advisor: Shrikanth Narayanan
Current Position: Machine Learning Researcher at Apple
Thamme Gowda
Thesis Title: The Inevitable Problem of Rare Phenomena Learning in Machine Translation
Advisor: Jon May
Current Position: Research Programmer at USC/ISI
Rujun Han
Thesis Title: Improve Machine Event-Centric Reasoning with Neuro-Symbolic Networks, QA and Language Generation
Advisors:: Aram Galstyan and Nanyun Peng
Current Position: Applied Scientist at AWS AI Lab
Akira Matsui
Thesis Title: Mining and Modeling Temporal Stuctures of Human Behavior in Digital Platforms
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Asst Professor at Yokohama National University
Ninareh Mehrabi
Thesis Title: Responsible Artificial Intelligence For A Complex World
Advisors::Aram Galstyan and Fred Morstatter
Current Position: Post Doc at Amazon
Raghuveer Peri
Thesis Title: Neural Representation Learning for Robust and Fair Speaker Recognition
Advisor: Shrikanth Narayanan
Current Position: Applied Scientist at Amazon
Shen Yan
Thesis Title: Fair Machine Learning for Human Behavor Understanding
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Researcher for Meta Research
2021
Xusen Yin
Thesis Title: Generalized Sequential Decision-Making via Language
Advisor: Jonanthan May
Current Position: Applied Scientist at Amazon
2020
Ashok Deb
Thesis Title: Modeling Information Operations and Diffusion on Social Media Networks
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Operations Analysis Branch, US Forces-Korea, Camp Humphreys, South Korea
Adam Badawy
Thesis Title: Analysis and Prediction of Malicious Users on Online Social Networks: Applications of Machine Learning and Network Analysis in Social Science
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Principal Data Scientist at Capital One
2019
Sahil Garg
Thesis Title: Hashcode Representations of Natural Language for Relation Extraction
Advisor: Aram Galstyan
Current Position: Vice President at Machine Learning Center of Excellence, Morgan Stanley
Palash Goyal
Thesis Title: Graph Embedding Algorithms for Attributed and Temporal Graphs
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Senior Research Scientist and Project Lead, Samsung Research America
2017
Hao Wu
Thesis Title: Building a Knowledgebase for Deep Lexical Semantics
Advisor: Jerry R. Hobbs
Current Position: Machine Learing Scientist/Engineer at Apple
2016
Niloofar Montezeri
Thesis Title: Building a Knowledgebase for Deep Lexical Semantics
Advisor: Jerry R. Hobbs
Current Position: Lecturer at UC, Riverside
2015
Mohsen Taheriyan
Thesis Title: Learning the Semantics of Structured Data Sources
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Software Engineer, Google
Qing Dou
Thesis Title: Beyond Parallel Data: Decipherment for Better Quality Machine Translation
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, Facebook
George Konstantinedes
Thesis Title: Scalable Data Integration Under Constraints
Advisor: Jose Luis
Current Position: Oxford University
Jeon-Hyung Kang
Thesis Title: Modeling Social and Cognitive Aspects of User Behavior in Social Media
Advisor: Kristina Lerman
Current Position: Research Scientist, Google
2014
Yoon-sik Cho
Thesis Title: Modeling and predicting with spatial-temporal networks
Advisor: Aram Galstyan
Current Position: For this summer, Academic Mentor at UCLA
Ashish Vaswani
Title: Smaller, Faster and Accurate Models for Statistical Machine Translation
Advisor: David Chaing
Co-Advisor: Liang Huang
Current Position: Computer Scientist, USC-ISI
2013
Dirk Hovy
Thesis Title: Learning semantic types and relations from text
Advisor: Jerry Hobbs
Current Position: Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Ardeshir Kianercy
Thesis Title: Adaptive agents on evolving network: An evolutionary game theory approach
Advisor: Aram Galstyan
Current Position: Post Doctorate fellow, Brady Urological Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital
2012
Nadeesha Ranasinghe
Thesis Title: Learning to Detect and Adapt to Unpredicted Changes
Advisor: Wei-min Shen
Current Position: Senior Researcher at Epiphany Science and Systems (EpiSci), San Diego, CA
Jason Riesa
Thesis Title: Syntactic Alignment Models for Large-Scale Statistical Machine Translation
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Google Translate Team, Fall 2012
Rumi Ghosh
Thesis Title: Disentangling the Network: Understanding the Interplay of Topology and Synamics in Network Analysis
Advisor: Kristina Lerman
Current Position: HP Labs, Post Doctoral
2011
Steve DeNeefe
Thesis Title: Tree-adjoining Machine Translation
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, SDL Language Weaver
Rutu Mulkar-Mehta
Thesis Title: Granular Causality for Learning by Reading
Advisor: Jerry Hobbs and Eduard Hovy
Current Position: NLP Research Scientist at Precyse Advanced Technologies
Sujith Ravi
Thesis Title: Deciphering Natural Language
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, Google
2010
Anon Plangprasopchok
Thesis Title: Statistical Approaches for Inferring Category Knowledge from Social Annotation
Advisor: Kristina Lerman
Current Position: National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Bangkok, Thailand
Jonathan May
Thesis Title: Weighted Tree Automata and Transducers for Syntactic Natural Language Processing
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, Language Weaver
Victoria Fossum
Thesis Title: Integrating Parsing and Word Alignment in Syntax-Based Machine Translation
Advisors:: Steven Abney and Kevin Knight
Current Position: Post-doctoral researcher at ISI
2009
Michael Rubenstein
Thesis Title: Self-Assembly and Self-Healing for Robotic Collectives
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Harvard University, Post Doctorate Researcher
Rahul Bhagat
Thesis Title: Learning Paraphrases from Text
Advisor: Ed Hovy
Current Position: Amazon
Matthew Michelson
Thesis Title: A Reference-Set Approach to Information Extraction from Unstructured, Ungrammatical Data Sources
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Fetch Technologies
2008
Brent Lance
Thesis Title: Procedural Animation of Emotionally Expressive Gaze Shifts in Virtual Embodied Characters
Advisor: Stacy Marsella
Current Position: Institute for Creative Technologies/Army Research Laboratory-HRED
Martin Michalowski
Thesis Title: A General Approach to Using Problem Instance Data for Model Refinement in Constraint Satisfaction Problem
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Adventium Labs
Rattapoom Tuchinda
Thesis Title: Building Mashups by Example
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
2007
Snehal Thakkar
Thesis Title: A Data Integration Approach to Dynamically Fusing Geospatial Sources
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Research Scientist, Google Research
Feng Pan
Thesis Title: Representing Complex Temporal Phenomena for the Semantic Web and Natural Language
Advisor: Jerry Hobbs
Current Position: Natural Language Scientist at Powerset Inc.
Donghui Feng
Thesis Title: Factorizing Information Extraction from Text Corpora
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: AT&T Yellow Pages Research
Alexander M. Fraser
Thesis Title: Improved Word Alignments for Statistical Machine Translation
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Research SCientist, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Namhee Kwon
Thesis Title: Text Understanding via Semantic Structure Analysis
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
2006
Mark Carman
Thesis Title: Learning Semantic Definitions of Information Sources on the Internet
Advisor: Craig Knoblock and Paolo Traverso (PhD degree from the University of Trento)
Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.
Dragos Stefan Munteanu
Thesis Title: "Exploiting Comparable Corpora"
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Research scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.
Soo-Min Kim
Thesis Title: "Identification, Classification, and Analysis of Opinions"
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: Postdoctoral research associate at USC/ISI
Shou-de Lin
Thesis Title: Modeling, Searching, and Explaining Abnormal Instances In Multi-Relational Networks
Advisors:: Hans Chalupsky and Kevin Knight
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the National Taiwan University
Radu Soricut
Thesis Title: Natural Language Generation for Text-to-Text Applications using an Information-Slim Representation
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Research scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.
Hal Daume III
Thesis Title: Practical Structured Learning for Natural Language Processing
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the University of Utah
Liang Zhou
Thesis Title: The Importance of Using Domain Knowledge in Solving Information Distillation Problems.
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: Postdoctoral research associate at USC/ISI
2005
Ching-Chien Chen
Thesis Title: Automatically and Accurately Conflating Road Vector Data, Street Maps, and Orthoimagery
Advisor: Cyrus Shahabi and Craig Knoblock
Deepak Ravichandran
Thesis Title: Terascale Knowledge Acquisition
Advisor: Ed Hovy
Current Position: Research scientist at Google Research
2003
Philipp Koehn
Thesis Title: Noun Phrase Translation
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh
Jay Modi
Thesis Title: Distributed Constraint Optimization for Multi-Agent Systems
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Drexel University
Greg Barish
Thesis Title: Speculative Plan Execution for Information Agents
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Scientist at Fetch Technologies
Benham Salemi
Thesis Title: Distributed Control for Chain-Type Self-Reconfigurable Robots
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Research scientist at USC/ISI
2002
Ion Muslea
Thesis Title: Active learning with multiple views
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Researcher Scientist at SRI International
Sheila Tejada
Thesis Title: Learning object identification rules for information integration
Advisor: Craig Knoblock/Steve Minton
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Tulane University
Jafar Adibi
Thesis Title: Self-Similarity Models for Data Mining
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Research scientist at USC/ISI
Irene Langkilde-Geary
Thesis Title: Automatic Sentence Generation Using a Hybrid Statistical Model of Lexical Collocations and Syntactic Relations
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University
Kenji Yamada
Thesis Title: A Syntax-Based Statistical Translation Model
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.
Yaser Al-Onaizan
Thesis Title: Translating Named Entities Using Bilingual and Monolingual Resources
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist at IBM Watson Laboratory
2001
Rogelio Adobbati
Thesis Title: Automated synthesis of software explanations
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: AssistMed
2000
Gal Kaminka
Thesis Title: Execution Monitoring in Multi-agent Environments
Advisor: Milind Tambe
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Bar-Ilan University
Marcelo Tallis
Thesis Title: A Script-Based Approach to Modifying Knowledge-Based Systems
Advisor: Yolanda Gil
Current Position: Research Scientist at Teknowledge
Naveen Ashish
Thesis Title: Optimizing informationmediatorsby selectively materializing data
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: NASA/Ames Research Center
1998
Jose Luis Ambite
Thesis Title: Planning by Rewriting
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Research Scientist at USC/ISI
1997
Chin-Yew Lin
Thesis Title: Natural Language Summarization
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research in Beijing
1996
Chunnan Hsu
Thesis Title: Learning effective and robust semantic knowledge for database query optimization
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Associate Research Fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan
Jihie Kim
Thesis Title: Bounding the Cost of Learned Rules: A Transformational Approach
Advisor: Paul Rosenbloom
Current Position: Research Scientist at USC/ISI
1995
Ben Smith
Thesis Title: Induction as Knowledge Integration
Advisor: Paul Rosenbloom
Current Position: Research staff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Others
Richard Angros
Thesis Title: Learning What to Instruct: Acquiring knowledge from demonstrations
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Ishuar Chander
Thesis Title: Automatic Postediting of Documents
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Northrup Gruman
Ali Erdem
Thesis Title: Task orientation and tailoring of interactive software explanations
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: Medical informatics company in San Diego
Randall W. Hill Jr.
Thesis Title: Impasse-Driven Tutoring for Reactive Skill Acquisition
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: Current Position: Director of USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
Lorna Zorman
Thesis Title: Requirements Envisaging by Utilizing Scenarios
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: mother (formerly HP Labs)
Kevin Benner
Thesis Title: Software Specification via Scenarios
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: CTO at a Minneapolis medical informatics company
Vibhu Mittal (1993)
Thesis Title: Generating Natural Language Descriptions with Integrated Text and Examples
Advisor: Cecile Paris
Current Position: Senior Scientist at Google, Inc. and Adjunct Faculty at CMU LTI