The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jingrui He will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019. She is currently an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University (ASU).
He's general research theme is to design, build, and test a suite of automated and semi-automated methods to explore, understand, characterize, and predict real-world data by means of statistical machine learning.
"I am focusing on two major challenges of 'big data,'" He said. "The first is rarity. Despite the fact that the data volume keeps growing, it is often the case that only a tiny portion is of interest to particular end users. For example, only a small number of the many tweets posted each day are rumors. I am working on techniques to detect, characterize, and predict such instances of rare classes."
"The second challenge is heterogeneity. The same data can be described in multiple ways. In one obvious example, crowdsourcing, different labelers may have different opinions regarding the same examples. To address these challenges, I am modeling the interplay among multiple types of heterogeneity in order to construct more reliable predictive models. The applications for my work that I am most interested in include social network/media analysis, healthcare, security, manufacturing, and transportation."
Prior to joining the ASU faculty in 2014, He worked as a faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology and as a research staff member at IBM. Her honors include an NSF CAREER Award, IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, and two IBM faculty awards. She is the author of Analysis of Rare Categories (Springer, 2012). She earned her PhD and MS in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University and MEng and BEng in automation from Tsinghua University.
"It is a great honor for me to join the world-renowned, vibrant community of the iSchool at Illinois," He said. "I truly believe that the iSchool is the ideal place for me to advance my career, both in terms of pursuing fundamental research and in terms of teaching a variety of courses in the area of information systems, empowering students with statistical machine learning techniques."
"We are very excited that Jingrui He is joining our School. She is an accomplished scholar who is working on extremely important problems involving how we can extract information from data—problems that are deep and difficult, and where progress can help us take better advantage of technology to meet societal needs. She is also a terrific instructor in areas where we have rapidly increasing needs. She is a wonderful addition to the growing iSchool faculty, and we look forward to her arrival in the fall," said Professor and Dean Allen Renear.