AI & Research Updates
- 24 June 2026 My paper The Person Multimodal Systems Cannot Finish has been selected for a Blue Sky Award at the 28th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026), a competitive track for visionary research sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium. This follows my Blue Sky Award at ICMI 2025.
- 15 May 2026 Our paper AI Tool for Theory-Aligned Grading and Feedback of Student Reflections: Preliminary Findings for Monitoring has been accepted at the IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) 2026.
- 13 May 2026 Recognized as a Silver Reviewer at ICML 2026, placing among the top reviewers for the conference.
- 30 April 2026 Two papers accepted at ICML 2026. The position paper received spotlight designation (top 5% of submissions), introducing a framework developed from Cézanne's painting practice to critique multimodal AI evaluation.
- 20 April 2026 My first PhD student, Ahatsham Hayat, successfully defended his dissertation, A Multimodal Approach for Building Generalizable and Reliable Models of Longitudinal Experiential Data. He has accepted a postdoctoral position with the Harvard Data Science Initiative at Harvard Medical School. Congratulations, Ahatsham!
- 6 March 2026 Received two awards at the conclusion of the College of Engineering's Murder in the Makerspace faculty workshop series on community-engaged research: 1st Place, Outreach and Engagement Pitch and People's Choice Award, Outreach and Engagement Pitch.
- 2 March 2026 Presented an invited talk titled What AI Gets Wrong About Human Experience and Why It Matters for Early Intervention at the UNMC Child Health Research Institute AI Seminar Series.
- 8 February 2026 Our paper Human-Guided Generative AI for Proactive STEM Student Support has been accepted at the 2026 ASEE Annual Conference.
- 6 February 2026 Received the People's Choice Award for Best Program Pitch at the College of Engineering's Murder in the Makerspace faculty workshop series on community-engaged research.
- 3 January 2026 Our paper From Numbers to Narratives: Efficient Language Model-Based Detection for Safety-Critical Minority Classes has been accepted at the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
- 15 October 2025 My paper MUSE: A Multimodal, Generative, and Symbolic Framework for Human Experience Modeling received the Best Paper (Runner-up) Award in the Blue Sky track at the 27th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2025), held in Canberra, Australia.
- 10 September 2025 Our paper Towards Reliable Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models has been accepted at the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2025).
- 08 August 2025 Our paper ConText-LE: Cross-Distribution Generalization for Longitudinal Experiential Data via Narrative-Based LLM Representations has been accepted at the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025).
- 31 July – 1 August 2025 Presented our paper at the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025), part of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Vienna, Austria.
- 7 July 2025 My paper MUSE: A Multimodal, Generative, and Symbolic Framework for Human Experience Modeling has been selected for a Blue Sky Award at the 27th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2025), a competitive track for visionary research sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium.
- 25 June 2025 Presented an invited talk on our research advancing Multimodal AI Systems for social good at the 3rd Symposium on NLP for Social Good 2025.
- 28–29 May 2025 Organized and delivered key presentations at a two-day AI workshop, "Engineering AI 3.0: From Pattern Matching to Intelligent Reasoning," for the College of Engineering faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
- 25 May 2025 Our paper on Modeling behavioral engagement from qualitative longitudinal data via a three-tier LLM framework has been accepted for presentation at the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025).
- 07 May 2025 Congratulations, Hunter Tridle, on receiving the 2025–2026 UCARE (Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experience) award!
- 01 April 2025 Our paper on Unlocking Optimal ORM Database Designs: Accelerated Tradeoff Analysis with Transformers has been accepted for presentation at the 2025 ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE).
- 17 Apr 2024 Congratulations, Ahatsham, on being awarded the Dean's Fellowship for the 2025–2026 academic year!
- 07 Mar 2025 Presented an invited talk titled "The AI Alignment Problem — Technical Challenges and Society Implications" at UNL College of Business' Emerging Technology Conference.
- 07 Mar 2025 Our paper on utilizing large language models for forecasting student engagement in STEM education has been accepted at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference.
- 27 February 2025 My interview on AI in education and ethics aired on The Nebraska News Service, a UNL College of Journalism initiative.
- 02 February 2025 Our paper on A Meta-Thinking Approach to Mitigating Linguistic Sycophancy in Vision-Language Models has been accepted for presentation at the 29th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).
- 29 Nov 2024 Our paper on A Context-Aware Approach for Enhancing Data Imputation with Pre-trained Language Models has been accepted for presentation at the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025).
- 17 Oct 2024 Presented an invited talk titled "The Future is Now – Transforming STEM Education by Leveraging Generative AI to Model Longitudinal Experiential Data" at UNL's Discipline-Based Education Research seminar.
- 09 Sep 2024 Our paper on Leveraging Language Models for Analyzing Experiential Time-Series Data in Education has been accepted at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA).
- 23 Aug 2024 Selected by UNL Chancellor to join a new AI Task Force convened by President Dr. Jeffrey P. Gold. This task force, including experts from all four University of Nebraska campuses, will focus on advancing generative AI and fostering inter-campus collaboration.
- 31 Jul 2024 Awarded NSF supplemental funding to develop a generative AI tool, using NLP and LLMs to improve the generation of theory-based feedback.