Research
Research Areas
Large Language Models
Evaluation, reasoning, instruction following, tool use, and robust deployment of LLM-based systems.
Responsible & Trustworthy AI
Safety, alignment, hallucination prevention, governance, refusal, and trustworthy generation.
Multimodal Machine Learning
Language, vision, audio, and affective signals for multimodal reasoning and interaction.
Embodied & Agentic AI
Vision-language-action models, embodied planning, grounded reasoning, and interactive agents.
Grants
Main PI
| Project | Funder | Period | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Embodied Foundational Models | CNRS@CREATE, NRF | -Jan 2026 - Dec 2029 | Total S$10M; awarded S$3.33M |
| Toward Generalist Vision Language Action Models | KLASS | Jan 2026 - Dec 2028 | S$1.5M |
| Google DeepMind GCP Grant | Google DeepMind | Jan 2026 - Dec 2026 | S$100K |
| Meta Audiobox Research Grant | Meta | Jan 2025 - Dec 2025 | S$70K |
| Prevent Hallucination in LLMs | DSO | Dec 2023 - Dec 2026 | S$800K |
| AI Governance Grant | AI Singapore | Jan 2024 - Dec 2026 | S$500K |
| Commonsense-aware Natural Language Processing | MoE Tier-2 | Aug 2021 - Aug 2024 | S$736K |
| K-EMERGE: Knowledge Extraction, Modelling, and Explainable Reasoning | AME | Feb 2020 - Feb 2023 | S$910K |
| Geopolitical Question Answering | DSO | Feb 2020 - Feb 2022 | S$800K |
| Hate Speech Detection | - | Feb 2020 - Sept 2021 | S$85K |
| Alibaba Gift Funding through IPP Program | Alibaba | Jan 2021 - Dec 2025 | S$100K |
| Multimodal Personalized Affective Dialogue Systems | NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Research Grant | Sept 2018 - Sept 2020 | S$200K |
Co-PI
| Project | Funder | Period | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| NMLP Research Grant | AI Singapore | Apr 2025 - Mar 2028 | S$4.9M |
| OpenAI Superalignment Grant | OpenAI | - | S$200K |
| Intent Inference | DSO | Feb 2020 - Feb 2022 | S$148K; total grant S$800K |
| Estate-IQ: Smart HDB Estate Services | HDB | July 2021 - June 2024 | S$4.9M |
| SUTD AI Program: Discovery by AI | SUTD | June 2020 - June 2023 | S$150K |
Awards
Students
Current PhD Students
Graduated PhD Students
| Name | Years | Current role |
|---|---|---|
| Devamanyu Hazarika | 2018 - 2022 | Amazon |
| Deepanway Ghosal | 2019 - 2024 | DeepMind |
| Rishabh Bhardwaj | 2020 - 2025 | Founder, Walled AI |
| Chen Hui | 2018 - 2023 | Postdoc, NTU |
| Chia Yew Ken | 2021 - 2025 | Alibaba DAMO Academy |
| Pengfei Hong | 2021 - 2025 | - |
| Wei Han | 2021 - 2025 | Huawei |
Service
Editorship & Chair (not updated)
Senior Area Chair / Area Chair at NAACL, AAAI, EMNLP, ACL and related CL venues.
Associate Editor: Cognitive Computation, Neurocomputing, Information Fusion.
SPC, IJCAI 2023; Workshop Chair, AACL 2022; Publicity Chair, ACL 2022; Area Chair, ARR; Area Chair, NeurIPS 2021.
Co-editor and organizer for special issues and workshops on affective computing, multimodal NLP, and sentiment analysis.
PC Membership (not updated)
AAAI, IJCAI, EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, COLING, and related venues.
Keynote & Invited Talks (not updated)
Invited speaker, IndoML 2025, Indian Symposium on Machine Learning.
Talk, Understanding, Leveraging, and Improving Large Language Models, The Web Conference Companion 2024.
Keynote talk on Utterance Level Dialogue Understanding, ICON 2020, India.
Keynote talk on Utterance Level Dialogue Understanding, MICAI 2020, Mexico.
Keynote talk on Emotion Recognition in Conversation, SocialNLP, IJCAI 2019, Macau.
Invited talks at University of Michigan, NUS, NTU, CICLing 2018, and Deep Learning Finance Summit 2018.
News Coverage
News coverage by mlreview.com for nlpoverview.com.
KDnuggets coverage of Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based NLP.
KDnuggets coverage of sarcasm detection with deep convolutional neural networks.
Datanami coverage of personality detection from text.
Education
| Degree | Institution | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. in Computer Science and Mathematics | University of Stirling, Scotland, UK | Feb 2014 - June 2017 |
| B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering | Jadavpur University, India | Aug 2009 - Dec 2013 |
Honorific Position
Adjunct Faculty, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIITD), India, Aug 2018 - Aug 2020.
Bibliometrics
One of the most productive authors in sentiment analysis research from 2000 to 2015.
One of the most prolific and impactful authors in sentiment analysis from 2003 to 2016.