I am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. My research goal is to build intelligence systems that solve real-world problems by automatically acquiring knowledge. This challenging goal involves two fundamental components: A machine learning component that can efficiently make coherent decisions for problems with complex structures, and a natural language understanding component that enables the system to extract knowledge from unstructured text. I have been published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and data mining.