School of CSE Seminar Series: Carl Yang

Speaker: Carl Yang, assistant professor at Emory University
Date and Time: September 13, 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Location: Coda 230
Host: Anqi Wu

Title: Expediting Next-Generation AI for Health via KG and LLM Co-Learning

Abstract: Large language models (LLM) have brought disruptive progress to information technology from accessing data to performing analytical tasks. While demonstrating unprecedented capabilities, LLMs have been found unreliable in tasks requiring factual knowledge and rigorous reasoning, posing critical challenges in domains such as healthcare. Knowledge graphs (KG) have been widely used for explicitly organizing and indexing biomedical knowledge, but the quality and coverage of KG are hard to scale up given the notoriously complex and noisy healthcare data with multiple modalities from multiple institutions. Existing approaches show promises in combining LLMs and KGs to enhance each other, but they do not study the techniques in real healthcare contexts and scenarios. In this talk, I will introduce our research vision and agenda towards KG-LLM co-learning for healthcare, followed by success examples from our recent exploration on LLM-aided KG construction, KG-guided LLM enhancement, and federated multi-agent systems. I will conclude the talk with discussions on future directions that can benefit from further collaborations with researchers interested in data mining or biomedical informatics in general.

Bio: Carl Yang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Emory University, jointly appointed at the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Rollins School of Public Health and the Center for Data Science in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2020, and B.Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University in 2014. His research interests span graph data mining, applied machine learning, knowledge graphs and federated learning, with applications in recommender systems, social networks, neuroscience and healthcare. Carl's research results have been published in 150+ peer-reviewed papers in top venues across data mining and biomedical informatics. He is also a recipient of the Dissertation Completion Fellowship of UIUC in 2020, the Best Paper Award of ICDM in 2020, the Best Paper Award of KDD Health Day in 2022, the Best Paper Award of ML4H in 2022, the Amazon Research Award in 2022, the Microsoft Accelerating Foundation Models Research Award in 2023, and multiple Emory internal research awards. Carl's research receives funding support from both NSF and NIH of USA.