Dr. Chengkai Li is Professor, Associate Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Director of the Innovative Data Intelligence Research Laboratory (IDIR) at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Li's research interests span several areas related to big data intelligence and data science, including data management, data mining, natural language processing, applied machine learning, and their applications in computational journalism. His current research focuses on building large-scale human-assisting and human-assisted data and information systems with high usability, high efficiency and applications for social good. Particularly, his ongoing research projects include data-driven fact-checking and web credibility, exceptional fact finding, usability challenges in querying and exploring graph data, and knowledge graphs. He has also worked on data exploration by ranking (top-k), skyline and preference queries, crowdsourcing, entity queries, database testing, database engine for top-k queries, and Web and XML data management.
To Aspiring Students
- I am always looking for sharp, highly motivated and hard-working PhD / Master's / Bachelor's students.
- NSF REU award available to undergraduate students doing research. Interested students can email me for further details.
Teaching [complete list]
- Office Hours in Spring 20: please email me for an appointment
Students [complete list]
- Ph.D. students:
Farahnaz Akrami
Fatma Arslan
Josue Caraballo
Jacob Devasier
Israa Jaradat (Recipient of NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) award)
Damian Jimenez (First Runner-Up Award in the SIGMOD17 Student Research Competition, undergraduate category)
Nasim Shirvani Mahdavi
Samiul Saeef
Xiao Shi
Theodora Toutountzi
Haiqi Zhang
Zeyu Zhang
Zhengyuan Zhu
- M.S. students:
Heet Madhu
- B.S. students:
Resha Adhikari
Rachit Agarwal
Sujan Dumaru
Hoang Luu
Dhruva Malik
Paras Pathak
Mapu Pham
- Graduated Ph.D. students:
Afroza Sultana
(Ph.D. dissertation: Efficient Evaluation of Contextual and Reverse Pareto-Optimality Queries, May 2018;
first-employment after graduation: Software Engineer, Teradata Lab, Los Angeles, CA)
Gensheng Zhang
(Ph.D. dissertation: Frameworks, Algorithms, and Systems for Efficient Discovery of Data-backed Facts, December 2017;
interned at NEC Labs and Google;
first-employment after graduation: Software Engineer, Google, Mountain View, CA)
Naeemul Hassan
(Ph.D. dissertation: Toward Automated Fact Monitoring And Checking, August 2016;
interned at AT&T and Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI);
first-employment after graduation: Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS)
Nandish Jayaram
(Ph.D. dissertation: Toward Better Usability of Query Systems for Massive Ultra-Heterogeneous Graphs: Novel Approaches of Query Formulation and Query Specification, May 2016;
co-advisor: Ramez Elmasri;
interned at IBM Research India and HP Labs;
first-employment after graduation: Member of Technical Staff, Pivotal, Palo Alto, CA)
Ning Yan
(Ph.D. dissertation: Novel Methods for Entity-centric Information Exploration, December 2013;
first-employment after graduation: Research Scientist, Huawei R&D Center, Santa Clara, CA)
Aditya Telang
(Ph.D. dissertation: A Holistic, Similarity-based Approach for Personalized Ranking in Web Databases, August 2011;
co-advised with Sharma Chakravarthy;
first-employment after graduation: Researcher, IBM Research India)
- Graduated M.S. Thesis students: name (graduation semester, first-employment after graduation)
Daniel Obembe (August 2020, o9 Solutions, Inc.), Sarthak Majithia (May 2019, Paycom), Sarbajit Roy (May 2019, Data245/WL), Ankit Shingavi (Aug. 2018, Amazon A9), Tulsi Chandwani (Dec. 2017, Red Hat), Abu Ayub Ansari Syed (Aug. 2017, CirrusLabs), Ishwor Timilsina (May 2017, Fidelity), Nigesh Shakya (May 2017), Rohit Bhoopalam (May 2016, Akamai), Fatma Dogan (Dec. 2015, UTA Ph.D. program), Minumol Joseph (Dec. 2015, Capital One), Ramesh Venkataraman (Aug. 2014, Amazon), Mahesh Gupta (Dec. 2012, EA), Jijo Philip (Dec. 2012, Cerner), Avinash Bharadwaj (Dec. 2011, Copper Labs), Quazi (Sunny) Hasan (Dec. 2010, Dematic), Jared Ashman (Dec. 2010, Ambit Energy), Assad Safiullah (Aug. 2008, Microsoft)
Codes, Data, Demos, Slides, and Videos
Media Coverage [complete list]
- By Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Dallas Morning News, KERA, NBC DFW, Austin American-Statesman, Popular Science, Poynter, Wired, and many more
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Projects [complete list]
- Credible Open Knowledge Network (COKN)
- Computational Journalism Research
- Exceptional Fact Finding
- Graph4U: Tackling Usability Challenges in Querying and Exploring Knowledge Graphs
- Misinformation, Computational Fact-Checking and Credible Web
Publications [complete list]
Funding Activities [complete list]
Professional Services [complete list]
- Conference/Workshop Organizing Committee:
The Convergence Accelerator Workshop @ ICDE 2020,
MisinfoWorkshop 19 Workshop Chair,
CIKM 18 Sponsorship Co-Chair,
SIGMOD 17 Finance Chair,
WAIM 16 Publicity Co-Chair,
IPCCC (General Co-Chair 12, Program Co-Chair 10)
- Guest Editor: ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ) special issue on Combating Digital Misinformation and Disinformation
- Editorial Board: Distributed and Parallel Databases
- Program Committee:
SIGMOD 21 20 19 18 16 15,
VLDB 21 20 19 17 15 14 13,
KDD 20 19 18 17 16 15,
SIGIR 20,
ICDE 21 20 19 18 (demo) 17 14 13 11 (demo),
EDBT 20 (senior PC) 14,
IJCAI 16,
WWW 16 15 14 13 11,
WSDM 21
- Journal Reviewer:
ACM SIGMOD Record,
ACM TODS,
ACM TOIS,
DKE,
DPD,
IEEE Computer,
IEEE TKDE,
IEEE TMM,
IEEE TNSE,
IEEE TPDS,
IPM,
Information Sciences,
Information Systems,
Journalism Studies,
DAMI,
JPDC,
KAIS,
VLDB Journal
- NSF Grant Review Panels (2020, 2019, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2010)
Invited Talks, Meetings, and Panel Appearances [complete list]
- "Restoring Trust by Computing: Data-driven Fact-checking and Exceptional Fact Finding"
[slides]
- Misinformation Roundtable, Computing Community Consortium, Washington, DC, March 26, 2019.
- Credibility on the Web Workshop, Google, New York City, New York, October 9, 2018.
- Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, August 1, 2018.
- Panelist, "How Bots Are Automating Fact-Checking", South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin, TX, March 13th, 2017.
- "Tackling Usability Challenges in Querying Massive, Ultra-heterogeneous Graphs"
[slides]
- "Enabling Computational Journalism: Automated Fact-Checking and Story-Finding"
[slides]
Awards
- ACM SIGMOD 2017 Most Reproducible Paper Award
- UT-Arlington Faculty Development Leave ("sabbatical"), Fall 2015
- VLDB 2014 Excellent Demonstration Award
- 2012 HP Labs Innovation Research Award
- 2011 HP Labs Innovation Research Award
- 3rd place in best Outrageous Ideas and Vision (OIV) Track paper competition in the 5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2011)
- 2005 Excellent TA Award, Department of Computer Science, UIUC
Follow @Chengkai_Li