Bio

Heng Ji is a Professor of Computer Science at Siebel School of Computing and Data Science of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the Co-Founder and CTO of Medicas AI, a company focusing on patient-centric AI for Drug Discovery. She is the Founding Director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE), and the Founding Director of CapitalOne-Illinois Center on AI Safety and Knowledge Systems (ASKS). She is a faculty member affiliated with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is named as an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Fellow in 2025 for her "significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction and AI for science." She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University under the supervision of the ACL Lifetime Achievement Awardee Prof. Ralph Grishman, and B.A. and M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University. The other awards she received include Outstanding Paper Award at ACL2024, two Outstanding Paper Awards at NAACL2024, "Young Scientist" by the World Laureates Association in 2023 and 2024, "Young Scientist" and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017, Amazon Scholar 2020-2025, "Women Leaders of Conversational AI" (Class of 2023) by Project Voice, "AI's 10 to Watch" Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, NSF CAREER award in 2009, PACLIC2012 Best paper runner-up, "Best of ICDM2013" paper award, "Best of SDM2013" paper award, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination, ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL2021 Best Demo Paper Award, Google Research Award in 2009 and 2014, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-2018. She has given many keynote speeches at top conferences including IJCAI2025 and EMNLP2025. She was invited to testify to the U.S. House Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, & IT Committee as an AI expert in 2023. She was invited by the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and AFRL to join Air Force Data Analytics Expert Panel to inform the Air Force Strategy 2030, and invited to speak at the Federal Information Integrity R&D Interagency Working Group (IIRD IWG) briefing in 2023. She is the lead of many multi-institution projects and tasks, including the U.S. ARL projects on information fusion and knowledge networks construction, DARPA ECOLE MIRACLE team, DARPA KAIROS RESIN team and DARPA DEFT Tinker Bell team. She has coordinated the NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task 2010-2020. She served as the associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and the Program Committee Co-Chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She was elected as the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023. Her research has been widely supported by the U.S. government agencies (DARPA, NSF, DoE, ARL, IARPA, AFRL, DHS) and industry (Amazon, CapitalOne, Adobe, IBM, Google, Bosch, Disney).