Rui Cao (曹睿)
Assistant ProfessorInformation Systems Technology and Design Pillar
Singapore University of Technology and Design
[Email] | [Faculty Page] | [Google Scholar]
Biography
I am currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Prior to joining SUTD, I was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Andreas Vlachos. I obtained my PhD degree at Singapore Management University, supervised by Prof. Jing Jiang. I obtained my bachelor degree at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Yingcai Honors College, majoring computer science.Research
My research explores how to make AI models beneficial for humans, at the intersection of language and vision. I focus on enhancing foundation models in terms of Interpretability, Compositionality, Trustworthiness and Safety, when interacting with multimodal data.Research Interests (more on the publication page):
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Multimodality: Improving compositional and knowledge-intensive multimodal understanding of foundation models in vision-language applications
- Image-Text Claim Verification: AVerImaTeC, Shared Task
- Multimodal Question Answering: Mod-Zero-VQA, KGen
- Survey: Multimodal Fusion
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Safety: Enhancing robustness of AI models towards uncertain scenarios, mitigating the bias of AI models and improving the trustworthiness of AI models
- Hallucination Mitigation: AVG-VTD, DecompGen
- Evaluation: CONFACT, FHSumBench
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Social Good: Applying AI models to address social challenges
- Hate Speech Detection: ASONAM Tutorial, HateGAN, ASONAM Tutorial,
- Hateful Meme Detection: WWW Tutorial, Mod-HATE, Pro-Cap, DisMultiHate,
🔥 We have a SUTD-funded PhD position available, starting in Spring 2027 (application deadline is September 2026). Students with relevant research or publication experience will be preferred. More details could be found [here].
News
- [July 2026]🔥 I am hiring a RA with a bachelor’s degree to work on video understanding.
- [May 2026]🔥I am hiring a RA with a bachelor’s degree to work on MLLMs.
- [March 2026] I will be attending EACL 2026. Look forward to a coffee chat with you in Morocco! We will be hosting the ninth FEVER workshop.
- [Jan 2026] I officially joined SUTD.
- [Nov 2025] 🔥 The shared task for the ninth FEVER workshop is available online! Please feel free to participant!
- [Sep 2025] We are pleased to announce that the ninth FEVER workshop will be co-located with EACL 2026!
- [Sep 2025] 🎉 Glad to share that two papers were accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
- [July 2025] I will be attending ACL 2025. Look forward to seeting you in Vienna. We will be hosting the eighth FEVER workshop.
- [Oct 2024] 🎉 We have successfully held the seventh FEVER workshop at EMNLP 2024
- [June 2024] I am honored to work with Prof. Andreas Vlachos at the University of Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.
- [June 2024] I successfully defended my thesis and completed my Ph.D. journey. Heartfelt thanks to my supervisor, Prof. Jing Jiang!
- [May 2024] We will be giving a tutorial at WWW 2024: Understanding (Dark) Humour with Internet Meme Analysis
- [Dec 2023] I will be attending EMNLP 2023 and look forward discussing with you!
Service & Activities
- Service:
- Organizing Committee for the ninth FEVER workshop, co-located at EACL 2026
- Organizing Committee for the eighth FEVER workshop, co-located at ACL 2025
- Organizing Committee for the seventh FEVER workshop, co-located at EMNLP 2024
- Conference Reviewer: reviewer for ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, COLING, WWW, ACM MM, IJCAI, AAAI and WebScience; Area Chair for ARR
- Journal Reviewer: Computational Linguistics (CL), Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
- Understanding (Dark) Humour with Internet Meme Analysis. Tutorial at WWW 2024
- Perils and Promises of Automated Hate Speech Detection. Tutorial at ASONAM 2020
Selected Honors & Awards
- First prize winner in the Smart City Challenge at WSDM, 2023
- Presidential Doctoral Fellowship, 2022
- The Outstanding Student Award (Top 10 undergraduates in University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), 2020
- National Scholarship, MoE of China, 2017
Teaching
- 10.020 Data Driven World (2026 Summer)
- 50.038 Computational Data Science (2026 Spring)
- TA for ISS609, Text Analysis and Applications, Singapore Management University
- TA for IS711, Learning and Planning in Intelligent Systems, Singapore Management University