Contact Information
2116 Siebel Center
201 N Goodwin
M/C 258
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Areas
Additional Campus Affiliations
Donald Biggar Willett Professor, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
Professor, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
Professor, Statistics
Professor, School of Information Sciences
Professor, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Recent Publications
Balog, K., & Zhai, C. (2026). The Indispensable Role of User Simulation in the Pursuit of AGI. Communications of the ACM, 69(5), 45-48. https://doi.org/10.1145/3768170
Liu, Y., Hou, Z., Xu, X., Wang, S., Wu, H., Yu, K., Yu, Y., & Zhai, C. (2026). HEV Generative Sandbox: A Framework for Assessing Domain-Specific SociaRisks Through Human-LLM Simulation. In S. Koenig, C. Jenkins, & M. E. Taylor (Eds.), Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (38 ed., pp. 32249-32257). (Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence; Vol. 40, No. 38). Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v40i38.40498
Alvarez, D. E., & Zhai, C. X. (2025). TINK: Text Information Navigation Kit. In SIGIR 2025 - Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 4056-4060). (SIGIR 2025 - Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3726302.3730141
Balog, K., Bernard, N., Zerhoudi, S., & Zhai, C. X. (2025). Theory and Toolkits for User Simulation in the Era of Generative AI: User Modeling, Synthetic Data Generation, and System Evaluation. In SIGIR 2025 - Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 4138-4141). (SIGIR 2025 - Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3726302.3731697
Chan, M. P. S., Jung, H., Morales, A., Zhang, A., O'Keefe, D., Joseph, S., Hron, A., Davis, J., Terry, T., Peterson, T., Herrman, C., Phillips, M., Osborne, J., Mcbride, K. G., Hensley, M., Todorov, A., Morrissette, A., Watson, G., Knox, E., ... Albarracin, D. (2025). Living health-promotion campaigns for communities in the United States: Decentralized content extraction and sharing through AI. PNAS Nexus, 4(6), Article pgaf171. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf171