James Caverlee
Professor and holder of the Tenneco Professorship in the College of Engineering
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University
Howdy! With my students and collaborators, I build trustworthy, resilient, and responsible AI that helps people connect to information and to each other. We draw on foundations in data mining, information retrieval, and recommender systems, and our work spans four dimensions: Reliable large language models ◆ Trustworthy and efficient recommendation ◆ AI in the public interest ◆ Social media mining.
Our work has appeared in major venues like KDD, ICLR, 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, am a PC co-chair for KDD 2026–2027 and WSDM 2027, and serve as a Senior Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. On the industry side, I have been a Google DeepMind Visiting Researcher (2023–2026) and an Amazon Scholar (2022–2023).
Research
Reliable Large Language Models
Language models are reshaping how people learn, build, and solve problems. Our aim is to make them more reliable, more robust, and more efficient to train and use.
Efficiency, robustness & bias
- How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs ICLR '26 · with Google DeepMind
- CHOIR: Collaborative Harmonization fOr Inference Robustness ACL '26
- GraphCheck: Breaking Long-Term Text Barriers with Extracted Knowledge Graph-Powered Fact-Checking ACL '25 · with University of Tokyo & Yale
- Masculine Defaults via Gendered Discourse in Podcasts and Large Language Models ICWSM '25
- DA^3: A Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack against Language Models EMNLP '24
Reasoning & training · with Shuiwang Ji's group
- When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck Perspective NeurIPS '26
- Learnability-Informed Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Language Models ICML '26
- Curriculum Reinforcement Learning from Easy to Hard Tasks Improves LLM Reasoning ICLR '26
- Inference-Time Computations for LLM Reasoning and Planning: A Benchmark and Insights TMLR '26
Trustworthy and Efficient Recommendation
Recommender systems shape much of what people read, watch, buy, and learn. We work to make them fair to the users and items they tend to overlook, and more efficient to deploy at scale.
Selected papers
- Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering KDD '25 · with Yale
- Combating Heterogeneous Model Biases in Recommendations via Boosting WSDM '25
- Mamba4Rec: Towards Efficient Sequential Recommendation with Selective State Space Models RelKD@KDD '24 Best Paper Award
- Empowering Long-tail Item Recommendation through Cross Decoupling Network (CDN) KDD '23 · with Google DeepMind
- Fighting Mainstream Bias in Recommender Systems via Local Fine Tuning WSDM '22
- Measuring and Mitigating Item Under-Recommendation Bias in Personalized Ranking Systems SIGIR '20
AI in the Public Interest
We bring our work in retrieval, language models, and evaluation to problems of public consequence. Current efforts include disaster management, health question answering, and auditing how institutions govern AI.
AI governance & health
- The Due Process Deficit: Auditing AI Governance in U.S. Higher Education FAccT '26 · with Cornell
- KG-Rank: Enhancing Large Language Models for Medical QA with Knowledge Graphs and Ranking Techniques BioNLP@ACL '24 · with University of Tokyo & Yale
- Infusing Disease Knowledge into BERT for Health Question Answering, Medical Inference and Disease Name Recognition EMNLP '20
Disaster management · with Ali Mostafavi's group
- DMRetriever: A Family of Models for Improved Text Retrieval in Disaster Management ACL '26
- DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Question Answering Evaluation in Disaster Management ACL Findings '26
- DisastIR: A Comprehensive Information Retrieval Benchmark for Disaster Management EMNLP Findings '25
Social Media Mining
Social platforms reveal a great deal about people, places, and expertise, but they are also easy to game. We introduced social honeypots that lure spammers into revealing themselves, tracked crowdsourced manipulation campaigns, and showed that users can be geo-located from what they write alone, work recognized with SIGIR and CIKM Test of Time honors.
Selected papers
- A Large-Scale Study of ISIS Social Media Strategy ICWSM '19
- What Are You Known For? Learning User Topical Profiles with Implicit and Explicit Footprints SIGIR '17
- Who is the Barbecue King of Texas?: A Geo-Spatial Approach to Finding Local Experts SIGIR '14
- Crowdturfers, Campaigns, and Social Media: Tracking and Revealing Crowdsourced Manipulation of Social Media ICWSM '13
- Seven Months with the Devils: A Long-Term Study of Content Polluters on Twitter ICWSM '11
- Uncovering Social Spammers: Social Honeypots + Machine Learning SIGIR '10 Test of Time Honorable Mention
- You Are Where You Tweet: A Content-Based Approach to Geo-locating Twitter Users CIKM '10 Test of Time Award
Publications
Students & Collaborators
Current PhD Students
PhD Alumni
| Tian Liu co-advised with Shu Kong | PhD, Aug 2026 | Machine Learning Research Engineer, Apple |
| Allen Lin | PhD, Dec 2025 | AI Research Scientist, Meta |
| Haoran Liu | PhD, Dec 2025 | Applied Scientist, Amazon |
| Mahsa Valizadeh ISEN, co-advised with Rui Tuo | PhD, Aug 2025 | |
| Majid Alfifi | PhD, Aug 2025 | AI Consultant, Thin-nology |
| Zhuoer Wang | PhD, Dec 2024 | Applied Scientist, Amazon |
| Karthic Madanagopal | PhD, Aug 2023 | Senior Applied Scientist, Thomson Reuters |
| Ziwei Zhu | PhD, Aug 2022 | Tenure-track Assistant Professor, GMU |
| Yun He | PhD, Aug 2022 | Senior Research Scientist, Meta |
| Jianling Wang | PhD, May 2022 | Research Scientist, Google DeepMind |
| Yin Zhang | PhD, May 2022 | Google DeepMind |
| Xing Zhao | PhD, Aug 2021 | Applied Scientist, Amazon |
| Parisa Kaghazgaran | PhD, Dec 2020 | Data Scientist, Walmart Labs |
| Cheng Cao | PhD, Dec 2017 | Applied Scientist Manager, Amazon |
| Hancheng Ge | PhD, Dec 2017 | Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon |
| Haokai Lu | PhD, Dec 2017 | Senior Software Engineer, Google DeepMind |
| Wei Niu | PhD, Dec 2017 | Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon |
| Derek Zhiyuan Cheng | PhD, May 2014 | Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google DeepMind |
| Kyumin Lee | PhD, Aug 2013 | Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute |
| Krishna Kamath | PhD, Aug 2013 | Senior Engineering Manager, Pinterest |
| Elham Khabiri | PhD, May 2013 | Research Staff Member, IBM Research |
| Said Kashoob | PhD, May 2011 | Dean, Ibri College of Technology (Oman) |
| Brian Eoff | on leave | Senior Software Engineer, Google |
| Jeremy Kelley | on leave | Building the future |
Visiting Scholars
MS & Undergraduate Researchers
Current and former MS students
- Michael Norman (MS, Aug 2025) — Visa Research
- Xiangrong Li (MS, Dec 2024)
- Laren Spear (MS, Dec 2024) — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Millenium Bismay (MS, Dec 2024) — Amazon
- Rohan Chaudhury (MS, Dec 2023) — Amazon
- Jinhao Pan (MS, Dec 2023) — PhD student at GMU
- Junyu Guo (MS, Dec 2023)
- Han Zhang (MS, May 2023)
- Monika Daryani (MS, May 2021) — Amazon
- Haiping Xue (MS, May 2019) — Facebook
- Aaron Knodell (MS, May 2019)
- Siddharth Verma (MS, Dec 2018) — Amazon
- Aniket Bonde (MS, Dec 2018) — Uber
- Tae Jun Jeon (MS, Aug 2018) — Kakao
- Rahul Bhagat (MS, May 2018) — Amazon
- Zhijiao Liu (MS, Dec 2015) — Amazon
- Ashraf Ibrahim (MS, Dec 2015)
- Himanshu Barthwal (MS, Aug 2015) — FactSet
- Vardharaj Lakshminarasimhan (MS, Dec 2014) — LinkedIn
- Sindhuja Venkatesh (MS, Dec 2014) — Amazon A9
- Vandana Bachini (MS, Dec 2013) — Google
- Amir Fayazi (MS, Dec 2013) — Google
- Yuan Liang (MS, Aug 2013) — Facebook
- Prithivi Tamilarasan (MS, Aug 2013) — eBay
- Jeff McGee (MS, May 2013) — ZipfWorks
- Liangliang Wang (MCS, May 2011) — Cisco
- Srihari Ananthapadmanabhan (MCS, Aug 2010) — Yahoo!
- Vignesh Venkataraman (MCS, Aug 2010) — Schlumberger
- Karthik Ramachandran (MCS, Aug 2010) — Amazon
- Lichun Li (MCS, May 2010) — Microsoft
- Chiao-Fang Hsu (MS, Dec 2009) — Amazon
- Anupam Aggarwal (MS, Dec 2009) — Yahoo!
- Chandan Aggarwal (MCS, Dec 2009) — Microsoft
- Robert Graham (MCS, Dec 2008) — UT Austin Applied Research Labs
Current and former undergraduate researchers
Undergraduate Research Scholars
- Stephanie Birkelbach
- Anna Irmatova
- Oliver Grabner
- Dayo Bamgbelu
- Caleb Lee
- Michael Norman, 2024
- Ronald Lee, 2023
- Shri Mathavan, 2023
- Jack Sebastian, 2023
- Charles Im, 2022
- Kareem Hirani, 2022
- Joycelin Gu, 2022
- Diva Kohli, 2022
- Timo Feldman, 2022
- Rakhi Shah, 2021
- Akash Rao, 2021
- Sagar Patel, 2020
- Jonathan Innis, 2020
- Benjamin Levinson, 2019
- Victoria Wei, 2019
- Kevin Nguyen, 2019
- Nathan Villanueva, 2018
- Nazif Ali, 2017
- Jason Bolden, 2013
NSF REU
- April Senner, Summer 2013
- Kalil Armstrong, Summer 2012
- Jason Bolden, Summer 2012
- Bethany Waldmann, Summer 2009
Undergraduate Researchers
- Ana Jimenez, 2023
- Soohwan Kim, 2023
- Krishnan Prashanth, 2023
- Ryan Mendoza, 2022
- Aditya Pethe, 2021–2022
- Maria Teleki, 2020–2022
- Habeeb Hooshmand, 2017–2018
- Tyler Durden, 2017
- Jared Russell, 2017
- Matt Shubert, 2012
- Ananta Uprety, 2012
- Joe Cabrera, 2011
- Michael Jablonski, 2011
- Matt Hillary, 2009
- J. Chris Elgin, 2008
Honors & Awards
Research Recognition
Early-Career Awards
Industry Research Awards
Texas A&M Honors
Teaching Awards
Recent Keynotes & Invited Talks
Teaching
Courses at Texas A&M
Other Teaching Experience
Service
Leadership
Program Committees & Editorial
Senior Program Committee, many times over: KDD, SIGIR, WSDM, CIKM, IJCAI, SDM, ICWSM, and many more
Program Committee, many times over: KDD, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, CIKM, RecSys, ICWSM, ICDM, HCOMP, SocInfo, ASONAM, ICDCS, and many more
Past editorial boards: IEEE TKDE, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer), IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Human Computation, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, GeoJournal (Springer)
Referee: ACM TOIS, ACM TiiS, ACM TISSEC, ACM TSAS, ACM TWEB, IEEE TKDE, CACM
NSF Panelist, regularly since 2009 (many panels)
