Chenkai Sun


I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on Natural Language Processing with Prof. ChengXiang Zhai and Prof. Heng Ji. I graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics, where I worked with Prof. H V Jagadish as a research assistant. Previously I worked as a research intern at Amazon Alexa AI and Alibaba. Additionally, I worked at Uber's ML Platform, during which I developed on customized evaluation pipeline. I also worked with Prof. Quentin F. Stout on the implementation of Isotonic Regression algorithms, published at CRAN.

I am broadly interested in building multimodal, socially-aware agents designed to tackle societal-level issues as well as cater to individual-specific needs, while ensuring information safety in communications. Recently, my efforts have been centered on aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human behavior, with a particular emphasis on personalization and fostering prosocial interactions.

If you are interested in collaboration, feel free to contact me at chenkai5 [at] illinois [dot] edu

Links: [Google Scholar] [Linkedin]

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2020 - December 2024 (expected)

University of Michigan
B.S. in Computer Science and Honors Statistics, 2016 - 2020

Internship


Publications


Teaching (TA Experience)