Heng Ji is a computer scientist who works on

information extraction Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...

and natural language processing. She is well known for her work on joined

named entity recognition Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre ...

and relation extraction, as well as for her work on cross-document event extraction. She has been coordinating the popular NIST TAC

Knowledge Base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...

Population task since 2010. She has been recognised as one of AI's 10 to watch by

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...

Intelligent Systems in 2013, and has won multiple awards, including a NSF Career Award in 2009,

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Research awards in 2009 and 2014, and an

IBM Watson IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder ...

Faculty Award in 2012.

Education

Heng Ji obtained a Bachelor's and master's degree in Computational Linguistics from

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (; abbr. THU) is a national public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education. The university is a member of the C9 League, Double First Class University Plan, Projec ...

. She subsequently obtained a MSc, then PhD in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

in 2008 under the supervision of Ralph Grishman. Her PhD thesis was on the topic of information extraction, with a particular focus on joint training of multiple components in the information extraction pipeline, as well as cross-lingual learning.

Career

Upon graduating with a PhD from

, Ji took up a position as assistant professor at

Queens College, City University of New York Queens College (QC) is a public college in the Queens Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City. It is part of the City University of New York system. Its 80-acre campus is primarily located in Flushing, Queens. It has a student body ...

, where she founded the BLENDER Lab, which focuses on research on cross-lingual, cross-documents, cross-media information extraction and fusion. In 2013, she joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an Edward P. Hamilton Development Chair and Tenured associate professor in Computer Science. Since 2019, she has been a full professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

, as well as an

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

Scholar.

Research

Heng Ji works in the area of natural language processing,

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed research papers. Her work is published in the proceedings of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

conferences, including the Annual Meeting of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...

, The Web Conference, and the ACM

Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining SIGKDD, representing the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, hosts an influential annual conference. Conference history The KDD Conference grew from KDD (Knowledge Di ...

(KDD). Ji is a leading researcher in

, having coordinated the popular NIST TAC

Population shared task since 2010. She is most recognised for her work on modelling interactions between subtasks in information extraction, which was also the topic of her PhD thesis, and for her work on event detection using cross-document signals.

Selected honors and distinctions

*2009 NSF Career Award *2009

Research Award *2012

Faculty Award *2013

AI's 10 to Watch *2014

Research Award *2016

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

, 'Young Scientist' *2017

, 'Young Scientist' *2020 Annual Meeting of the

, best demonstration paper

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ji, Heng Living people Computer scientists Natural language processing researchers New York University alumni Tsinghua University alumni Women computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Data miners