Haopeng Zhang
Haopeng Zhang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Data Science in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he directs the ALOHA (Advanced Language Processing and Human Analytics) Lab. Prior to UNC Charlotte, he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis, under the supervision of Dr. Jiawei Zhang. He also holds dual M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computational Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research focuses on natural language processing, large language models, agentic AI, and their real-world applications.
Research Interests
I am broadly interested in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, with a particular focus on:
- NLP: Summarization, Generation, Low-Resource Languages
- Generative AI: LLMs, Multimodal LLMs, LLM agents
- AI4Science: Healthcare, Linguistics, Education, Sensing, Food Science, Nutrition
- Graph Mining: Graph4NLP
News
- Career08.2026: Happy to share that I will join the School of Data Science in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as an Assistant Professor this fall.
- Funding07.2026: Happy to receive support from the NOAA Cooperative Institute Fostering Aquaculture Research and Markets (CIFARM).
- Career06.2026: Congratulations to Shouju on starting her research internship at Zoom Inc. and Haohan on starting his research internship at Ping An Insurance.
- Service06.2026: Excited to participate in the AI in Cybersecurity Education Faculty Development Summer Institute 2026, supported by NSF.
- Pub06.2026: Recent paper now available on arXiv: Hierarchically Aligned Multimodal Benchmark for Unified Video Understanding.
- Pub05.2026: Research papers accepted to ICML 2026 and npj Mental Health Research.
- Pub04.2026: One research paper on LLM Reasoning for Summarization has been accepted to the findings of ACL 2026.
- Pub01.2026: Two research papers on Structured Summarization for LLM and RAG Attack have been accepted to the findings of EACL 2026.
- Pub12.2025: Recent papers now available on arXiv: Reasoning for Summarization, Generative Engine Optimization, Multilingual, and Multimodal Privacy.
- Funding10.2025: Happy to receive support from the American Medical Association(AMA) Precision Education Grant.
- Award10.2025: Our submission "Hawaiian Language Physical Reasoning Dataset" received the Best Shared Task Contribution Awards at the EMNLP 2025 Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Workshop.
- Career10.2025: Happy to join the Department of Linguistics as a cooperating faculty member.
- Pub08.2025: One research paper on Low Resource Pacific Language has been accepted to the Findings of EMNLP 2025 and featured in UH news.
- Career08.2025: Happy to join the Abundant Intelligence project.
- Pub08.2025: Recent collaboration papers on LLM + Linguistics and LLM + Healthcare have been accepted to Information and JMIR AI journals.
- Pub05.2025: Recent papers now available on arXiv: Structured Summarization, Workflow Generation, RAG Attack, and Multimodal Summarization Survey.
- Award04.2025: Congratulations to my PhD student Haohan on being accepted into the AI @ HIDSI Fellows Program.
- Career04.2025: Happy to join the University of Hawaii Cancer Center (UHCC) as an Affiliate Member.
- Pub04.2025: One research paper on Multimodal Reasoning has been accepted to the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning workshop at CVPR 2025.
- Pub04.2025: One research paper on retrieval augmented generation is accepted to IJCNN 2025.
- Funding02.2025: Thrilled to receive the UH Manoa Faculty Research Travel Fund! Looking forward to NAACL 2025 in Albuquerque.
- Funding01.2025: Excited to receive support from the NSF SCH program.
- Pub01.2025: One research paper A Structure-aware Generative Model for Biomedical Event Extraction is accepted to DASFAA 2025.
- Funding01.2025: Excited to receive $7,500 computing credits from OpenAI’s Researcher Access Program.
- Pub01.2025: One research paper on summarization domain adaptation is accepted to findings of NAACL 2025.
- Pub01.2025: One survey paper on text summarization is accepted to ACM Computing Surveys (IF:23.8).
- Service11.2024: Excited to share that I will organize the 5th Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization (NewSumm) at EMNLP 2025, Suzhou.
- Service11.2024: Honored to serve as an area chair for ACL 2025 and as a minitrack chair for AMCIS 2025.
- Funding10.2024: Excited to receive computing credit awards from Google Cloud.
- Service09.2024: Honored to serve as a panelist for NSF.
- Funding09.2024: Glad to receive computing credits from NSF ACCESS Allocations program.
- Service08.2024: Thrilled to attend NSF Innovation, Culture, and Creativity (ICC) workshop.
- Pub06.2024: My Ph.D. dissertation Building Intelligent and Reliable Summarization Systems and one survey paper on text summarization is available online.
- Career05.2024: 🎓 Successfully Completed My Ph.D. at UC Davis. Officially Dr. Zhang!
- Career04.2024: 🎉 I will join the information and computer sciences (ICS) department of University of Hawaii at Mānoa this August. Aloha!
- Pub03.2024: one research paper is accepted to NAACL 2024.
- Pub02.2024: one first-authored research paper is accepted to LREC-COLING 2024.
- Pub10.2023: two first-authored research papers are accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2023.
- Pub09.2023: one first-authored research paper is accepted to IJCNLP-AACL 2023.
- Career06.2023: start my research internship at AWS AI lab.
- Pub06.2023: one first-authored research paper is accepted to LLM4AI workshop at KDD 23.
- Pub05.2023: one first-authored research paper is accepted to ACL 2023 CODI.
- Pub05.2023: one first-authored research paper is accepted to Findings of ACL 2023.
- Career04.2023: start my research internship at Megagon Lab.
- Award03.2023: receive UC Davis GGCS Research Fellowship.
- Career02.2023: passed my QE exam.