👋 I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Boise State University, directing the Machine Intelligence and Data (MIND) Lab. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I earned my PhD in Computer and Information Science and Engineering from Syracuse University. I was recognized as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT (2024) and in Data Science by UCSD, UChicago, and Stanford (2024).
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CALL FOR PAPERS - The special issue “Explainable AI and Network Science for Social Systems and Collective Intelligence” in Information Processing & Management (impact factor: 6.9) is now accepting submissions. More details are available here.
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OPEN POSITIONS - My lab offers fully funded PhD positions and welcome students at all levels. If you're interested in working with me, please feel free to email me with your CV/resume and transcript.
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(Due to the volume of messages and my availability, I’m unable to respond to every email (apologies!). If you don’t hear back, please don’t take it as a reflection of your abilities and potential—it often comes down to timing or alignment.)
🎓 My research develops and evaluates machine learning and foundation models with and for real-world societal impact, integrating data science and HCI methods in pursuit of futures where people and AI thrive together. Current interests include, but are not limited to:
My work has been published in journals such as CSUR (impact factor: 28) and conferences including WWW, CHI, CIKM, WSDM, and ICWSM, with 6000+ citations. It was featured in the ACM Showcase and media outlets such as Psychology Today. As PI/Co-PI, I received funding from the UW Paul G. Allen School, School of Medicine, Population Health Initiative, and Center for an Informed Public. I am a Co-Chair for the WSDM 2026 Doctoral Consortium, a Guest Editor for Information Processing & Management, serve on program committees for conferences such as WWW, KDD, AAAI, and SIGIR, and review for journals including TPAMI, TKDE, TOIS, TIFS, and TMM. I also actively collaborate across academia, industry, non-profits, and government.
May 2026
April 2026
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December 2025
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Multimodal Large Language Models as Synthetic Participants in Video-Based Studies: An Evaluation Prabal Shrestha, Bohan Jiang, Haoning Xue, Huan Liu, Xinyi Zhou Boise State University, Arizona State University, University of Utah Workshop on Large Language Models for Social Reasoning and Simulation (SocialLLM) @ ICWSM, 2026
https://github.com/MINDLab25/mllm-human-simulation-eval
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One of the reasons I love my job is working with self-motivated students :).
My parents and I had a rabbit named Maodu (毛肚). She crossed the rainbow bridge at the age of seven. I now live with a cat, Pumpkin, and a Westie named Funding.