His research interests include data mining, information retrieval, and machine learning, with a particular focus on computational user modeling and knowledge discovery. He has published over 20 research papers on these topics in top data mining and information retrieval venues, including KDD, WWW, SIGIR and WSDM. He is the recipient of the 2012 Google PhD Fellowship in Search and Information Retrieval, and 2012 Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Award in Web Information Management. He has served on program committees for several major conferences such as ICML, ECML/PKDD, and ECIR, and reviewed for multiple journals, including IEEE TKDE, ACM TOIS, Neurocomputing and BMC Bioinformatics.