He obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and bachelor's degrees in computer science and in economics from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining CU Boulder, he spent a year at University of Washington as a postdoc. His research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. He has published papers primarily at ACL and WWW, and also at KDD, WSDM, ICWSM, etc. His work has been covered by many news media outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He also won a Facebook fellowship and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award.