Welcome to Jingbo’s Homepage!
I’m an Associate Professor at UCSD jointly appointed by Computer Science and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. I obtained my Ph.D. from UIUC advised by Prof. Jiawei Han in 2019. I received my B.E. from SJTU in 2014. I’m also a coach of the UCSD’s ACM-ICPC team.
Research Interests
My lab studies how AI systems learn, reason, and collaborate with human experts, with an emphasis on scalable knowledge discovery under limited supervision.
We develop methods that leverage semantic anchors, data redundancy, and bias-aware learning to train and adapt large language models (LLMs) with minimal human input. A central contribution of our work is the paradigm of Extremely Weak Supervision (XWS), which enables task learning from brief natural-language guidance rather than large annotated datasets, similar to the task-specific guidelines provided to human annotators. We adopt a data-driven approach to improve the accuracy of knowledge extraction and discovery without requiring significant additional human annotations.
Our methods are domain- and language-agnostic, powering scientific discovery and enterprise AI in settings where scalable supervision is the primary bottleneck. Ultimately, we aim to build models that adapt robustly across domains and make knowledge discovery more accessible, inclusive, and efficient.
My work has been recognized with major honors including the NSF CAREER Award, Google Research Scholar Award, ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award (Runner-up), Best Poster Award (Runner-up) at The Web Conference (WWW), and Google PhD Fellow.
My Schedule
You can find my schedule here. The “Week” view will present you the details of slots.
Outreach in Computer Science Education
Two original Chinese-language books aimed at making computer science more engaging, relatable, and accessible to learners of all ages.
Cooking from Computer Science Perspective
I have decided to be a Youtuber, sharing my cooking secrets, because COVID-19 makes many of my students have to cook at home by themselves for the first time.
Cooking is one of my hobbies and it is a great relax to me. From the computer science perspective, I can see many related concepts and problems: (1) parallelization, (2) hyper-parameter tuning, (3) scheduling, etc. In my humble opinion, cooking, to some extent, should be easier than making complicated deep learning models effective in experiments. Throughout my 5-year PhD study at UIUC, I have summarized some tricks to prepare two delicious entrees in 30 mins. Here is my Youtube Channel. Since my cooking secrets are mostly about Chinese food, so the videos are in Chinese. If you like it, don’t forget to subscribe it!
Prospective Students
I’m actively recruiting students who are excited about doing fun research. My lab has openings for PhD students and research internship opportunities for master/undergrad students (UCSD or external). Please check the following items before sending me an email.
- Applicants for UCSD PhD Program: Please make sure that you have applied online (CSE PhD Program and/or HDSI PhD Program) and select my name as one of the faculty members that you wish to work with. I will carefully review every applicantion that mentioned my name.
- Research Internship Opportunities:
- If you are currently at UCSD: I only take students who (1) have a clear research problem/objective and some initial ideas; (2) have relevant research experiences or have strong background in math/stats/physics; and (3) could devote enough time on research. Please highlight these in your email including a time plan.
- If you are not at UCSD (e.g., Summer Internship): Visitors are mostly recommended by my collaborators and have their own funding support. The minimum duration of stay at UCSD is 12 weeks (preferably 6 months - 1 year). Please indicate the time range in your email.
In your email, please include the following items:
- Title as “Prospective Student: YourName - YourAffliation”
- Briefly introduce what research problem that you are interested in. What are the current state-of-the-art solutions and why do you think you can further improve over them?
- Briefly introduce yourself, including education background, research experiences, and programming skills.
- Briefly explain your motivations and expectations of working with me.
- Include a PDF version of your CV.