James Caverlee

Professor and holder of the Tenneco Professorship in the College of Engineering
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M University
infolab
[my_last_name] 'at' tamu.edu

Industry engagement:
Google DeepMind Visiting Researcher, 2023-2026
Amazon Scholar, 2022-2023

About Me: Howdy! I'm a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and holder of the Tenneco Professorship in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. With my students and collaborators, we aim to develop trustworthy, resilient, and responsible machine learning algorithms and systems to help people connect to information and to each other. Our group focuses on personalization, efficiency, and AI risks in domains like LLMs, recommender systems, conversational systems, and speech. Our work has appeared in major venues like KDD, EMNLP, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, AAAI, RecSys, and more. Our papers have been recognized with the 2022 SIGIR Test of Time Award Honorable Mention, the 2020 CIKM Test of Time Award, plus several Best Paper (Candidate) awards. Our research has been generously supported by an NSF CAREER award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and multiple grants from Google, Amazon, AFOSR, DARPA, and the NSF. I was the General Co-Chair of WSDM 2020 and serve as a Senior Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, as well as the Senior Program Committee of many venues.

Recent News:

  • Teaching Alert: GenAI for Engineers in Fall 2026! Open to all engineers; no programming experience necessary.
  • Recent and Upcoming Keynotes: OARS (at RecSys 2026), PILA (at KDD 2026), WSDM 2026, RelWeb (at WWW 2025).
  • Service Update: Serving as a PC co-chair for KDD 2026 and also for WSDM 2027!
  • Big shout out to Derek Zhiyuan Cheng (PhD 2014) for being honored with the Texas A&M CSCE Distinguished Former Student Award. Amazing! Derek is a Principal Scientist / Research Director at Google DeepMind.

Publications

See also my publications at DBLP, Google Scholar, and at Semantic Scholar. 2007 and earlier

Students and Collaborators

Visiting Scholars

Current and Former PhD Students

Current and Former MS Students

Current and Former Undergrads

Teaching

Courses at Texas A&M

Other Teaching Experience

Service (not updated)

Honors and Awards