School of CSE Seminar Series: Carl Yang

Speaker: Carl Yang, assistant professor at Emory University
Date and Time: February 13, 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Location: Coda 230
Host: B. Aditya Prakash

Title: Expediting Next-Generation AI for Health via KG and LLM Co-Learning

Abstract: Large language models (LLM) have brought disruptive progress to information technology from accessing data to performing analytical tasks. While demonstrating unprecedented capabilities, LLMs have been found unreliable in tasks requiring factual knowledge and rigorous reasoning, posing critical challenges in domains such as healthcare. Knowledge graphs (KG) have been widely used for explicitly organizing and indexing biomedical knowledge, but the quality and coverage of KG are hard to scale up given the notoriously complex and noisy healthcare data with multiple modalities from multiple institutions. Existing approaches show promises in combining LLMs and KGs to enhance each other, but they do not study the techniques in real healthcare contexts and scenarios. In this talk, I will introduce our research vision and agenda towards KG-LLM co-learning for healthcare, followed by success examples from our recent exploration on LLM-aided KG construction, KG-guided LLM enhancement, and federated multi-agent systems. I will conclude the talk with discussions on future directions that can benefit from further collaborations with researchers interested in data mining or biomedical informatics in general.

Bio: Carl Yang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Emory University, jointly appointed in the Rollins School of Public Health and Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2020, and B.Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University in 2014. His research areas span data mining, deep learning, multimodality foundation models and trustworthy AI, with applications in graph analytics, neuroscience, biomedicine and healthcare. Carl's research results have led to 250+ peer-reviewed publications in top venues across AI/ML and medicine/healthcare. He serves as the Organizer of Health Day and Inaugural Program Chair of AI4Sciences in KDD, and the Chair-Elect of AMIA KDDM Working Group. He is also a 1% NIH/CDC Grant Awardee in 2025, and a recipient of the ACM SIGKDD Rising Star Award in 2025 (one winner a year in the world), NSF CAREER Award in 2025, NIH K25 (Career) Award in 2023, and multiple Best Paper Awards such as of MedInfo 2025, KDD Health Day 2022, ML4H 2022, and ICDM 2020.