Assistant Professor

Contact Information
523 John D. Tickle Engineering Building,
817 Neyland Drive,
Knoxville, TN 37996-2315
Phone
865-974-3905
Email
[email protected]
Links
Google Scholar
ORCID
Personal Website
Research Areas
- Multimodal Machine Learning (Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Speech Processing,Embodied AI)
- Human-Computer Interaction and Human-AI Teaming and Collaboration
- Intelligent Agents and AI-Based Decision Support
- Affective Computing and Behavioral Understanding
- Applications in Education, Healthcare, and Autonomous Agents
Biography
Yi Ding is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he directs the Assistive Intelligence Lab. His research bridges multimodal machine learning and human-computer interaction primarily in the vision, language, and speech modalities.
Applications of his work include education, AI safety, autonomous systems, and more. His research has been funded by the Department of Defense and industry partners including Toyota and The Home Depot.
He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and additionally spent several years in industry at Apple, Amazon, and Cisco, where his work resulted in several US patents. He publishes regularly at top AI and HCI venues including ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL, CSCW, and more.
Education
- PhD, Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
- MS, Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
- BS, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- BS, Mathematics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Professional Service
- NSF Review Panelist, 2022 and 2023
- Regular Program Committee Member and Reviewer: AAAI, ARR, ACM Multimedia, CVPR, ECCV/ICCV, ICMI, ICML, IUI, Neurips, and WACV
Awards & Recognitions
- Fiona and Michael Goodchild Graduate Mentoring Award, UC Santa Barbara (2022)
- Outstanding Mentoring Award, Department of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara (2022)
- CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher, Honorable Mention (2010)