His primary research interests are machine learning and application to speech and language processing, computer vision, and robotics. He had won outstanding student paper awards at NIPS 2006 and ICML 2004. He was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow in 2013, won an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award in 2012, and was a member of DARPA 2010 Computer Science Study Panel. He has a Ph.D (2007) from Computer and Information Science from U. of Pennsylvania and B.Sc and M.Sc from Southeast University (Nanjing, China)