Dr. Jie Cao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma and the director of the OUNLP Lab. His research centers on natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on dialogue and discourse modeling, structured prediction, large-language-model alignment and agentic systems, multi-modal communication, and trustworthy AI.
Prior to joining OU, Dr. Cao was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, and his M.S. and B.Eng. from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
The OUNLP Lab works on building robust and interpretable AI systems that support human learning, communication, and collaboration. Current research directions include:
- Multi-party and multi-modal dialogue systems
- Retrieval-augmented and grounded generative models
- Structured prediction and discourse-aware representation learning
- Trustworthy AI in education and healthcare contexts
Dr. Cao is actively recruiting motivated Ph.D., Master’s, and undergraduate researchers who are interested in language technology, human-AI teaming, and interactive learning systems.