JI Heng (季姮)
Full Professor, UIUC; Amazon Scholar; Founding Director of Amazon-Illinois AICE Center
JI Heng (季姮) is a Full Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, with affiliated appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. She is an Amazon Scholar and the Founding Director of the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE).
She earned her B.A. and M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing, particularly multimedia multilingual information extraction, knowledge-enhanced large language models, and vision-language models.
She was elected as an ACL Fellow in 2025. Her awards include NSF CAREER (2009), IEEE 'AI's 10 to Watch' (2013), two NAACL 2024 Outstanding Paper Awards, and the 2023 WLA Young Scientist award.
She has testified to the U.S. House as an AI expert and leads multiple DARPA and ARL projects.