UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This weekend, as thousands of Penn Staters earn their degrees, one 26-year-old graduate will be presented with not her first, but second, doctorate.
Limeng Cui, who will receive a doctoral degree in information sciences and technology, has been a precocious student since a young age. At just 10 years old, Cui was admitted to the Experimental Class for Exceptionally Gifted Children in Beijing with 26 other classmates. To be enrolled into the program, which has a 2% acceptance rate, Cui had to complete three rounds of rigorous tests.
“It is a specialized accelerated program where students are expected to finish grades five through 12 in four years,” she said. “Then I enrolled at college at age 14.”
In 2013, she received a bachelor's degree in software engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology. Then, she completed her first doctoral program, in computer applied technology, at the School of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Chinese Academy Sciences in 2018.
In that program, which was mainly focused on optimization, Cui studied support vector machines and tensor analysis and decomposition. While this research experience laid a solid mathematical foundation, she wanted to strengthen the connection between her research and real-world professional applications.
“As post-doc positions usually provide further training in the same field, I decided to apply to another graduate program instead where I could use my science knowledge to build more humanized technologies,” she said.
She chose the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology because of its interdisciplinary program.
“The core vision at IST includes information, technology and human-centered-design, which makes the research in IST have a broader impact on society,” she said. “I was impressed by the cutting-edge research conducted by people from diverse backgrounds, and the multidisciplinary projects led through interlaboratory and interdepartmental collaborations.”
Cui further found her path at Penn State through the guidance of her adviser Dongwon Lee, professor of IST, whom Cui said set an example of excellence as an advisor, researcher and instructor.
"Working with Limeng for the last four years has been such a rewarding journey,” said Lee. “Due to her maturity in research, I have always felt that we were collaborating instead of me advising her. In particular, I greatly enjoyed our intellectual back-and-forth discussions during research meetings.”
Working with Lee, Cui focused her Penn State research on how to detect online misinformation and lessen its effect — a challenging problem, she said, due to the multi-modality, interpretability and costs of human annotation. She further explored it through her dissertation topic, “understanding and detecting online misinformation with auxiliary data.”
“I leveraged various types of information from different perspectives to understand and detect misinformation,” she said “For example, user engagements over news articles, including posts and comments, contain justification about the news article. These auxiliary data provide rich contextual information for more accurate and interpretable detection.”
That work and her findings have led to her research being presented at top conferences in social network analysis and artificial intelligence.
Since starting her Penn State doctoral program, Cui has completed research internships at Amazon, where she studied fraud detection on e-commerce websites; Facebook AI, where she worked with the artificial intelligence integrity team developing AI-based violation classifiers to remove offensive content and improve user experience; and IQVIA.
“These internships helped me learn what skills I needed to practice more and what I was already good at,” she said. “I acquired the ability to network and build personal relationships. They also helped me build a path to permanent employment with that company. I received job offers from all of them after I completed the program.”
She has also been active in the University’s Chinese Student Council (CSC). The organization provides a platform for international students from China at Penn State to share feedback. Cui says this helped her develop soft skills like communication, teamwork, and problem-solving.
“Learning how to work well with a team is essential for any career,” she said. “It also provides me an opportunity to give back to the community through acts of service and fun events."
After graduation, Cui will work for Amazon as an applied scientist. While her path to this point has been largely driven by her seemingly natural academic prowess, Cui said that it was not without challenges. She shared a piece of advice with fellow IST students.
“Always be the hardest worker in the room. It's worth it,” she said. “Even if you must overcome a myriad of obstacles, you will eventually get to where you deserve to be.”