I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS) at Singapore Management University (SMU). Previously, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester (UR), where I was advised by Prof. Jiebo Luo. My research lies at the intersection of AI and human behavior, where I develop human-aligned AI systems that can understand, reason, and act in ways consistent with human cognition and decision-making, ultimately addressing real-world challenges for social good.

Prospective Students: If you are interested in working with me as a Ph.D. student, master's student, undergraduate student, visiting student, or research intern, please send me an email with your CV, transcripts (if applicable), and a brief description of your research interests and relevant experience.

For information about the Ph.D. program and the application process, please visit https://computing.smu.edu.sg/phd.

• [05/04/2026]   🎓 Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation. Grateful for the parting words from my advisor and committee members: “May the Force be with you, always.”
• [01/15/2026]   I will serve as a Senior Program Committee Member for ICWSM 2026.
• [08/02/2025]   🎾 First-time finalist! I made it to the finals of Men's 3.0 Singles at the 2025 District Championships in Rochester.
• [10/15/2024]   I will serve as an Area Chair for NAACL 2025.
• [08/29/2024]   I was awarded the 2024 Google PhD Fellowship. 🎉🎉
• [07/30/2024]   Our new study analyzing Reddit comments post-ChatGPT launch explores the tech community's and general public's perceptions of AI.
• [06/15/2024]   I will serve as an Area Chair for EMNLP 2024.
• [05/15/2024]   Our study on the factors contributing to crowdfunding success has been featured in The Wall Street Journal.
• [11/13/2023]   🔥 Check out our latest exploration on GPT-4V(ision) for social multimedia analysis tasks including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, fake news identification, demographic inference, and ideology detection!
• [07/13/2023]   In our new studies (ICWSM 2024, ICWSMW 2023), we uncover media bias in 1.8 million headlines across the political spectrum. Our findings suggest that media bias is growing. The work is also covered by StudyFinds, and shared by ScienceBlog, RealClearScience, Nation, Mirage.News, Phys.org, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) via EurekAlert!
• [03/21/2023]   Our survey entitled Human Behavior in the Time of COVID-19: Learning from Big Data, is accepted for publication in the Horizons in Big Data 2022 article collection of Frontiers in Big Data.
• [03/09/2023]   I was awarded the 2023 Arts, Sciences and Engineering Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship. 🎉🎉
• [03/25/2022]   Our study on the scale and scope of the influence of misinformation and fact-based news about COVID-19 vaccines on social media platforms on the vaccine uptake is covered by multiple news outlets including Medical Economics, News Medical, News Wise, UK Today News, and Medical Xpress.
• [05/19/2021]   In a new study, we dissect the public responses to the #StopAsianHate movement using large scale Twitter data and provide findings that can help design better ways of reducing tension and misunderstandings between ethnic groups. The work is also covered by Rochester Beacon and Futurity.
• [08/12/2020]   We won the first place of the University of Rochester Biomedical Data Science Hackathon Summer 2020.
• [07/23/2020]   Tech Xplore reports a series of our recent studies that show Twitter mirrors our attitudes and feelings about COVID-19. These findings are shared in a lightning presentation for chairs of computer science PhD-granting departments and heads of major industrial research labs at the Computing Research Association (CRA) Virtual Conference.
• [05/30/2020]   Our work on analyzing the use of controversial terms of COVID-19 on Twitter is highlighted by IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE. Incidentally, this story shares the headlines with the story about the successful launch of the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft. Cool! This work is also covered by Tech Xplore.
• [03/26/2020]   Our work on analyzing the performance of the crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe over a wide variety of funding categories is covered by The New York Times.

• Assistant Professor, Singapore Management University, 2026 - Present
• Ph.D., University of Rochester, 2021 - 2026
• M.S., University of Rochester, 2019 - 2020
• B.Econ., Fudan University, 2013 - 2017

• Best Paper Nominee at AIED 2025
• Google PhD Fellowship, 2024
• Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship, 2023

Revising Context, Shifting Simulated Stance: Auditing LLM-Based Stance Simulation in Online Discussions
Xinnong Zhang*, Wanting Shan*, Hanjia Lyu^†, Zhongyu Wei, Jiebo Luo
arXiv: 2606.06443


Probing Outcome-Level Resemblance and Mechanism-Level Alignment in LLM Risk Decisions: Evidence from the St. Petersburg Game
Chensong Huang, Changyu Chen, Chenwei Lin, Hanjia Lyu^†, Xian Xu, Jiebo Luo
arXiv: 2606.04978


SocioVerse: A World Model for Social Simulation Powered by LLM Agents and A Pool of 10 Million Real-World Users
Xinnong Zhang, Jiayu Lin, Xinyi Mou, Shiyue Yang, Xiawei Liu, Libo Sun, Hanjia Lyu, Yihang Yang, Weihong Qi, Yue Chen, Guanying Li, Ling Yan, Yao Hu, Siming Chen, Yu Wang, Jingxuan Huang, Jiebo Luo, Shiping Tang, Libo Wu, Baohua Zhou, Zhongyu Wei
arXiv: 2504.10157

Building Human-Aligned AI through Representation Augmentation and Structuring
Hanjia Lyu
WSDM 2026


Characterizing Bias: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Simplified versus Traditional Chinese
Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo, Jian Kang, Allison Koenecke
FAccT 2025 [Code and Data]


GPT-4V(ision) as A Social Media Analysis Engine
Hanjia Lyu*, Jinfa Huang*, Daoan Zhang*, Yongsheng Yu*, Xinyi Mou*, Jinsheng Pan, Zhengyuan Yang, Zhongyu Wei, Jiebo Luo
ACM TIST, 2025 [Data]


INS-MMBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LVLMs' Performance in Insurance
Chenwei Lin, Hanjia Lyu, Xian Xu, Jiebo Luo
ICCV 2025 [Code and Data]


Assessing Historical Structural Oppression Worldwide via Rule-Guided Prompting of Large Language Models
Sreejato Chatterjee, Linh Tran, Quoc Duy Nguyen, Roni Kirson, Drue Hamlin, Harvest Aquino, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo, Timothy Dye
BigData 2025 [Code and Data]


Irony in Emojis: A Comparative Study of Human and LLM Interpretation
Yawen Zheng, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2025


From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning
Yu Xia*, Subhojyoti Mukherjee*, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joseph Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian Mcauley
ACL 2025


GUI Agents: A Survey
Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
ACL 2025


Empower K-12 Teachers to Create ML-Supported Scientific Inquiries
Xiaofei Zhou, Hanjia Lyu, Yuxin Sa, Mengfan Li, Advait Sarkar, Jiebo Luo, Michael Daley, Zhen Bai
AIED 2025 Best Paper Nominee


Representation Bias in Political Sample Simulations with Large Language Models
Weihong Qi, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
WWW 2025


Evolver: Chain-of-Evolution Prompting to Boost Large Multimodal Models for Hateful Meme Detection
Jinfa Huang*, Jinsheng Pan*, Zhongwei Wan, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
COLING 2025 [Code]


Mixture of Weak & Strong Experts on Graphs
Hanqing Zeng*, Hanjia Lyu*, Diyi Hu, Yinglong Xia, Jiebo Luo
ICLR 2024 [Code]


Computational Assessment of Hyperpartisanship in News Titles
Hanjia Lyu*, Jinsheng Pan*, Zichen Wang*, Jiebo Luo
ICWSM 2024 [Data]
Media: UofR News Center, Study Finds, ScienceBlog, EurekAlert


Human vs. LMMs: Exploring the Discrepancy in Emoji Interpretation and Usage in Digital Communication
Hanjia Lyu*, Weihong Qi*, Zhongyu Wei, Jiebo Luo
ICWSM 2024


LLM-Rec: Personalized Recommendation via Prompting Large Language Models
Hanjia Lyu, Song Jiang, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Qifan Wang, Si Zhang, Ren Chen, Chris Leung, Jiajie Tang, Jiebo Luo
NAACL 2024


Towards Advancing Text-Based User and Item Representation in Personalized Recommendation
Hanjia Lyu
CIKM 2024


Excitements and Concerns in the Post-ChatGPT Era: Deciphering Public Perception of AI through Social Media Analysis
Weihong Qi, Jinsheng Pan, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
Telematics and Informatics, 2024 [Data]
Media: UofR News Center, Futurity


Semantics Preserving Emoji Recommendation with Large Language Models
Zhongyi Qiu, Kangyi Qiu, Hanjia Lyu, Wei Xiong, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2024 [Code]


In the Eyes of the Bystander: Are the Stances on Different Conflicts Correlated?
Yiyao Tao*, Hengyu Zhang*, Babli Dey, Selenge Tulga, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2024


CRTRE: Causal Rule Generation with Target Trial Emulation Framework
Junda Wang, Weijian Li, Han Wang, Hanjia Lyu, Caroline Thirukumaran, Addisu Mesfin, Hong Yu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2024


A Benchmark and Chain-of-Thought Prompting Strategy for Large Multimodal Models with Multiple Image Inputs
Daoan Zhang*, Junming Yang*, Hanjia Lyu*, Zijian Jin, Yuan Yao, Mingkai Chen, Jiebo Luo
ICPR 2024


Learning to Evaluate the Artness of AI-generated Images
Junyu Chen, Jie An, Hanjia Lyu, Christopher Kanan, Jiebo Luo
IEEE TMM, 2024


Holistic Visual-Textual Sentiment Analysis with Prior Models
Junyu Chen, Jie An, Hanjia Lyu, Christopher Kanan, Jiebo Luo
MIPR 2024


SoMeLVLM: A Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing
Xinnong Zhang*, Haoyu Kuang*, Xinyi Mou, Hanjia Lyu, Kun Wu, Siming Chen, Jiebo Luo, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
ACL 2024 [Project Page] [Code]


Creating An Authoring Tool for K-12 Teachers to Design ML-supported Scientific Inquiry Learning
Xiaofei Zhou, Jingwan Tang, Hanjia Lyu, Xinyi Liu, Zhenhao Zhang, Lichen Qin, Fiona Au, Advait Sarkar, Zhen Bai
CHI 2024


Unifying Local and Global Knowledge: Empowering Large Language Models as Political Experts with Knowledge Graphs
Xinyi Mou, Zejun Li, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo, Zhongyu Wei
WWW 2024


Human Behavior in the Time of COVID-19: Learning from Big Data
Hanjia Lyu, Arsal Imtiaz, Yufei Zhao, Jiebo Luo
Frontiers in Big Data, 2023


Understanding Divergent Framing of the Supreme Court Controversies: Social Media vs. News Outlets
Jinsheng Pan, Zichen Wang, Weihong Qi, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2023


A Fine-Grained Analysis of Public Opinion toward Chinese Technology Companies on Reddit
Enting Zhou*, Yurong Liu*, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2023


Wyze Rule: Federated Rule Dataset for Rule Recommendation Benchmarking
Mohammad Mahdi Kamani, Yuhang Yao, Hanjia Lyu, Zhongwei Cheng, Lin Chen, Liangju Li, Carlee Joe-Wong, Jiebo Luo
NeurIPS 2023


How Art-like are AI-generated Images? An Exploratory Study
Junyu Chen, Jie An, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
McGE, ACM MM 2023


Dismantling Hate: Understanding Hate Speech Trends Against NBA Athletes
Edinam Kofi Klutse, Samuel Nuamah-Amoabeng, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
SBP-BRiMS 2023


Applying Machine Learning to Predict Esophageal Cancer Recurrence After Esophagectomy
Hanjia Lyu*, Kevin C. Kapcio*, Kyle C. Purrman, Christian G. Peyre, Carolyn E. Jones, Michal J. Lada, Jiebo Luo
ICDH 2023


Predicting Adverse Neonatal Outcomes for Preterm Neonates with Multi-Task Learning
Jingyang Lin, Junyu Chen, Hanjia Lyu, Igor Khodak, Divya Chhabra, Colby L Day Richardson, Irina Prelipcean, Andrew M Dylag, Jiebo Luo
ICDH 2023


Bias or Diversity? Unraveling Fine-Grained Thematic Discrepancy in U.S. News Headlines
Jinsheng Pan*, Weihong Qi*, Zichen Wang, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
MEDIATE, ICWSM 2023


ML-SD Modeling: How Machine Learning Can Support Scientific Discovery Learning for K-12 STEM Education
Xiaofei Zhou, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo, Zhen Bai
AI4Edu, AAAI 2023


Understanding Political Polarization via Jointly Modeling Users, Connections and Multimodal Contents on Heterogeneous Graphs
Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
MM 2022


Social Media Study of Public Opinions on Potential COVID-19 Vaccines: Informing Dissent, Disparities, and Dissemination
Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wang, Wei Wu, Viet Duong, Xiyang Zhang, Timothy D. Dye, Jiebo Luo
Intelligent Medicine, 2022
Media: News Medical


Misinformation versus Facts: Understanding the Influence of News Regarding COVID-19 Vaccines on Vaccine Uptake
Hanjia Lyu, Zihe Zheng, Jiebo Luo
Health Data Science, 2022
Media: Medical Economics, News Medical, News Wise, Medical Xpress


Doctors vs. Nurses: Understanding the Great Divide in Vaccine Hesitancy among Healthcare Workers
Sajid Hussain Rafi Ahamed, Shahid Shakil, Hanjia Lyu, Xinping Zhang, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2022


Oppression, COVID Vaccination, and Vaccine Sentiments in a Global Sample
Timothy Dye, Lisette Alcántara, Hanjia Lyu, Shazia Siddiqi, Saloni Sharma, Eva Pressman, Jiebo Luo
Annals of Epidemiology (ACE Abstracts), 2022


American Twitter Users Revealed Social Determinants-related Oral Health Disparities amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
Yangxin Fan, Hanjia Lyu, Jin Xiao, Jiebo Luo
Quintessence International, 2022


Applying Machine Learning to Predict Esophageal Cancer Recurrence After Esophagectomy
Kevin C. Kapcio, Hanjia Lyu, Kyle C. Purrman, Christian G. Peyre, Jiebo Luo, Carolyn E. Jones, Michal J. Lada
Journal of the American College of Surgeons, ACS Clinical Congress 2022


Taking sides: Public Opinion over the Israel-Palestine Conflict in 2021
Arsal Imtiaz, Danish Khan, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
SocialSens, ICWSM 2022


Look behind the Censorship: Reposting-User Characterization and Muted-Topic Restoration
Yichi Qian, Qiyi Shan, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
SocialSens, ICWSM 2022


Learning to Aggregate and Refine Noisy Labels for Visual Sentiment Analysis
Wei Zhu, Zihe Zheng, Haitian Zheng, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
ICPR 2022


Challenges and Design Opportunities in Data Analysis for ML-Empowered Scientific Inquiry – Insights from a Teacher Professional Development Study
Xiaofei Zhou, Jingwan Tang, Beilei Guo, Hanjia Lyu, Zhen Bai
ICLS 2022


Understanding Public Opinion toward the #StopAsianHate Movement and the Relation with Racially Motivated Hate Crimes in the US
Hanjia Lyu, Yangxin Fan, Ziyu Xiong, Mayya Komisarchik, Jiebo Luo
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2021
Media: UofR News Center, Rochester Beacon, Futurity


From Static to Dynamic Prediction: Wildfire Risk Assessment Based on Multiple Environmental Factors
Tanqiu Jiang, Sidhant Bendre, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2021


Understanding the Hoarding Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic using Large Scale Social Media Data
Xupin Zhang, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
BigData 2021
Media: Tech Xplore, UofR News Center


Social Media Opinions on Working From Home in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study
Ziyu Xiong, Pin Li, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
JMIR: Medical Informatics, 2021


Characterizing Discourse about COVID-19 Vaccines: A Reddit Version of the Pandemic Story
Wei Wu, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
Health Data Science, 2021


What Contributes to a Crowdfunding Campaign’s Success? Evidence and Analyses from GoFundMe Data
Xupin Zhang, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
IEEE Journal of Social Computing, 2021
Media: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal


The Influence of COVID-19 on people’s Well-Being: Big Data Methods for Capturing Working Adults’ Well-being and Protective Factors Nationwide
Xiyang Zhang, Yu Wang, Hanjia Lyu, Yipeng Zhang, Yubao Liu, Jiebo Luo
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021


Fine-Grained Analysis of the Use of Neutral and Controversial Terms for COVID-19 on Social Media
Long Chen, Hanjia Lyu, Tongyu Yang, Yu Wang, Jiebo Luo
SBP-BRiMS 2021
Media: IEEE Spectrum, Tech Xplore, UofR News Center


How Political is the Spread of COVID-19 in the United States? An Analysis using Transportation and Weather Data
Karan Vombatkere, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo
SBP-BRiMS 2021


Monitoring Depression Trends on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study
Yipeng Zhang, Hanjia Lyu, Yubao Liu, Xiyang Zhang, Yu Wang, Jiebo Luo
JMIR: Infodemiology, 2021
Media: Tech Xplore, UofR News Center


InsurTech development: Evidence from Chinese media reports
Siqing Cao, Hanjia Lyu, Xian Xu
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2020


Sense and Sensibility: Characterizing social media users regarding the use of controversial terms for COVID-19
Hanjia Lyu, Long Chen, Yu Wang, Jiebo Luo
IEEE TBD, 2020
Media: IEEE Spectrum, Tech Xplore, UofR News Center

Area Chair: NAACL 2025, EMNLP 2024

Senior Program Committee: ICWSM 2027, ICWSM 2026

Guest Editor: Frontiers in Public Health, ACM TOMM Special Issue

• [06/07/2026]   🎾 I made it to the round of 16 of Men's 3.5 Singles at the Kickoff Singles 2026 in Rochester.
• [09/11/2025]   🎾 I made it to the round of 16 of Men's Singles (Open Division) at the 2025 Flower City Open Tennis Tournament in Rochester.
• [08/02/2025]   🎾 First-time finalist! I made it to the finals of Men's 3.0 Singles at the 2025 District Championships in Rochester.
• [04/05/2025]   I played my first two UTR-verified matches 🎾 at the TCR in Pittsford, NY, and won both! My rating went up from 1.xx–3.xx to 5.92, though it's currently 20% reliable. 😂
• [10/10/2024]   I was able to watch the magnificent aurora together with some members of VIStA at Webster Pier in Rochester, NY after missing a chance to see one in Vienna back in May.
  
• [05/04/2023]   While we waited by the front door of a restaurant in Santa Clara, we caught sight of this beautiful rainbow. Even better, we were lucky to meet a lovely couple who offered to take a picture of us.