I am an Assistant Professor at Halicioğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), UC San Diego (UCSD). My research interests include Causal Discovery and Inference, Causality-Empowered ML/AI and Foundation Models, White-Box LLMs, GUI Agents, World Models, and VLA Models.

I received my Ph.D. degree at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2022. I am fortunate to work with my supervisors Prof. Kun Zhang and Prof. Clark Glymour. Before joining CMU, I got my Master’s degree in Neural Information Processing at the University of Tübingen, Germany (2012 – 2014). Later, I joined the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Bernhard Schölkopf‘s lab), working on causal discovery (2014 – 2015).

I am taking on new students and postdocs from HDSI, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and related departments. Welcome to contact me if you are interested in my research.

I am recruiting a postdoc researcher to join our team and build the next generation of causality-empowered VLA Models and World Models.

Selected News:

04/2025: Our Causal-Copilot: Autonomous Causal Analysis Agent (Version 2) was released.

2024: Our Causal-Copilot: Autonomous Causal Analysis Agent (Version 1) was released.

2024: Program Co-Chair for the 4th Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR 2025)

2024: Keynote/invited talks at ACIC, RLC workshop, Celluar and Molecular Medicine at UCSD, etc.

2023: Keynote/invited talks at KDD workshop, ICSA conference, USC summer school, IROS workshop, UAI workshop, SIAM conference, UCSD Biostatistics seminar, UCSD ECE seminar, etc.

11/2021: Our Python package for causal discovery ‘causal-learn‘ was released.

10/2021: I was named a Rising Star of the Trustworthy ML Initiative.

04/2021: I was awarded the 2021 Apple Scholars in AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML).