Yan Leng

Biography

Yan Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, with a courtesy appointment at the School of Information. She is a core member of the UT Machine Learning Lab and an affiliate of the MIT Media Lab. Dr. Leng received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2020, after earning dual master’s degrees in Computer Science and Transportation Engineering at MIT.

As a computational social scientist and network scientist, Dr. Lengdraws on methods from artificial intelligence, network analysis, and the social sciences to illuminate how complex systems and human behavior intersect in both digital and physical environments. Guided by social science theories, she develops interpretable deep learning approaches for networks, examining and predicting how information, influence, and spillovers spread or interact. Dr. Leng also investigates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit human-like tendencies, uncovering the origins of these behaviors within the models’ high-dimensional representation space. Her interdisciplinary efforts span social networks, business networks, human mobility, recommender systems, and generative AI, with funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Marketing Science Institute, UT Good Systems, Texas Global, UT Research & Creative Grants, and UT McCombs.

Dr. Leng’s findings have been published in both business and computer science venues, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), as well as in the proceedings of premier conferences such as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. By integrating interdisciplinary methodologies, she seeks to advance transparent and responsible AI practices that address real-world challenges in business, technology, and society.

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