SenticNet

Sentic Team

Sentic Team is like a jazz band: all together we play the intriguing riffs of affective computing and sentiment analysis but each of us is also playing solo the countermelodies of subjectivity detection, aspect extraction, microtext normalization, anaphora resolution, named entity recognition, sarcasm detection, and many more. The team is located at the Computational Intelligence Lab (CIL) in the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS) of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

The team consists of a couple of postdocs and a dozen PhD students, plus several research students, interns, part-time researchers, and visiting collaborators.  Each team member is contactable via email at first-name@sentic.net. For general info about SenticNet, you can write to info@sentic.net. If interested in using SenticNet for your company, please visit our corporate website or contact us at business@sentic.net.

ERIK CAMBRIA
Erik is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at NTU CCDS, where he also holds the appointment of Provost Chair in Computer Science and Engineering, and a Visiting Professor at MIT Media Lab. He has founded several AI companies, such as SenticNet, offering B2B sentiment analysis services, and finaXai, providing fully explainable financial insights, and has worked at HP Labs and Microsoft Research prior to joining academia. Today, his research focuses on neurosymbolic AI for interpretable and explainable affective computing in domains like mental health, climate resilience, and socially responsible investing. Prof Cambria is ranked in Clarivate's List of World's Top 1% Scientists since 2022, is recipient of many awards, e.g., AI's 10 to Watch, and was featured in Forbes as one of the 5 People Building Our AI Future. He is an IEEE Fellow, Associate Editor of various top journals, e.g., IEEE Trans on Affective Computing, and is involved in several AI conferences, e.g., AAAI. When he is not busy answering emails, Erik likes cooking, retrogaming, motorcycling, and snowboarding.

RUI MAO
Rui is currently a research fellow at NTU CCDS under the supervision of Erik Cambria. He obtained his PhD in Computing Science from the University of Aberdeen, UK in 2020. During the final months of his PhD, he was also a research scientist intern at Amazon, working on sentiment analysis and business benchmarking. Before becoming a researcher in Computing Science, Rui was a strategy manager in Hodo Group, engaging in strategy management and doing consultancy from 2011 to 2014. Rui received his MSc (distinction) in Business Analytics from the University of Surrey, UK in 2016 and BSc in Business Administration from Nanjing College for Population Program Management in 2011. His current research focuses on metaphorical cognition in AI and humans. Apart from NLP research, Rui also likes to play guitar and cooking.

XULANG ZHANG
Xulang received her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from NTU CCDS in 2024 under the co-supervision of Prof Erik Cambria and Dr Rui Mao. She is currently a reseach fellow in the Sentic Team, where she carries out research on affective computing, sentiment analysis, and NLP. In particular, she is focusing on the application of multitask learning to granular syntactic processing, e.g., for POS tagging, text chunking, lemmatization, and sentence boundary disambiguation, in support of several downstream NLP tasks. In addition, she is interested in integrating such syntactic processing techniques to more advanced semantic tasks such as concept extraction, aspect extraction and polarity detection. In her free time, Xulang likes yoga, fictions, and is a binge reader.

LUWEI XIAO
Luwei earned his PhD in Computer Application Technology from East China Normal University, Shanghai, in 2025 under the supervision of Prof Liang He. He is currently a research fellow in the Sentic Team, jointly supervised by Prof. Gianmarco Mengaldo and Prof. Erik Cambria, where he investigates multimodal learning, sentiment analysis, and large language models. In particular, his current work focuses on cognitive and aesthetic causality for multimodal sentiment analysis, with the goal of uncovering visual connotations and clarifying the intricate links between aesthetics and human emotion. Beyond research, Luwei enjoys soccer, swimming, karaoke, and traveling.

TIESUNLONG SHEN
Tiesunlong received his BEng in Computer Science from Southwest University and a PhD in Computer Science at Yunnan University. He is currently a research fellow in the Sentic Team, jointly supervised by Prof. Enrico Petretto and Prof. Erik Cambria. His research focuses on developing reasoning models for LLMs, designing LLM-based information retrieval systems that can provide more accurate and context-aware results, and leveraging graph models to enhance knowledge representation, inference, and explainability. He is also deeply interested in faithful question answering over knowledge graph. In his spare time, Tiesunlong enjoys playing Mahjong, training AI agent to automatically write technical blogs, and contemplating the meaning of life.

XIANXUN ZHU
Xianxun is a postdoctoral researcher co-advised by Prof. Erik Cambria, working at the intersection of multimodal data analytics, affective computing, and sentiment analysis. He holds a joint PhD in Computing from Macquarie University (Australia) and Shanghai University (China). His doctoral and postdoctoral research centers on multimodal emotion visualization, multimodal representation learning, cross-modal fusion, and trustworthy deployment for real-world applications across healthcare, intelligent mobility, and human–machine interaction. Beyond academia, Xianxun founded a technology company and serves as a senior technical advisor to several firms, translating cutting-edge AI into scalable products and services. Outside of work, he enjoys boxing, kayaking, and fitness.

SENG-BENG HO
Seng-Beng is a Honorary Member of the Sentic Team and the CEO of AI Institute Global, which conducts research and courses in AI. He has a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. From 1998 to 2008, he was Founder and President of E-Book Systems, a company that developed and marketed a novel 3D page-flipping interface for electronic books, with offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing, Tokyo, Germany, and Singapore. He holds 36 US and world-wide patents related to e-book technology. Until 2024, he was the Deputy Director of the Department of Social and Cognitive Computing at A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing. His current research interests include knowledge representation for conceptual, motivational, and affective processes in natural language communication. In his free time, Seng-Beng enjoys reading, Chinese poetry-writing, movie-going, and building super-scale Lego and Meccano models.

RUICHENG LIU
Ruicheng got his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from NTU. After graduating, he worked as a Project Officer in NTU School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. His research experience includes applying deep learning techniques in systemic risk prediction and applying graph neural networks on market risk management. Since 2020, he is pursuing a part-time PhD at CCDS under Prof Erik Cambria. His PhD work gravitates around fundamental issues of sentiment analysis research, e.g., coreference resolution, and its application to real-world problems, especially those related to fintech and natural language based financial forecasting. When he is not busy studying and researching about AI, Ruicheng likes to play basketball, going to the gym and swimming.

ZONGLIN YANG
Zonglin received his Bachelor's degree in Electronic Information Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Cornell University. After that, he joined the Sentic Team as a PhD student under the supervision of Prof Erik Cambria. He is generally interested in developing deep learning systems that can utilize or 'reason' over (commonsense) knowledge to provide more informative and intelligent solutions such as using language models as inductive reasoners. This general research goal needs to integrate methods from various directions of AI. In his spare time, Zonglin likes playing basketball, jogging, and reading.

SIDNEY SUEN
Sidney received his Bachelor of Engineering in Information Systems Technology and Design from Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2018. He later worked in A*STAR for 2 years as a research engineer before being awarded the A*STAR Computing and Information Science (ACIS) scholarship. He will be pursuing a full time PhD at NTU CCDS under the tutelage of Prof Erik Cambria and Dr Kenneth Kwok from Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC). His research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, integrating commonsense into AI systems, and LLM-based recommendations. He aims to develop knowledge bases that exposes the subtle aspects of human interaction such as cultural norms. In his free time, Sidney likes watching anime, lifting weights, and taking longs walks to the beach.

YAN LIU
Yan received her Bachelor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2020. After graduation, she joined A*STAR and worked as a research engineer for 2 years. Her research work is related to knowledge representation and reasoning for NLP applications such as knowledge-based question answering and dialogue systems. She is pursuing a PhD degree under the supervision of Erik Cambria at NTU School of Computer Science and Engineering (CCDS) and Seng-Beng Ho at A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC). Her main research interests are neurosymbolic AI, knowledge-based sentiment analysis and harnessing large language models for scientific novelty detection. In her free time, she likes karaoke, reading and jogging.

WEIJIE YEO
Weijie received his Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering in 2020. He worked for a year and a half in a semiconductor company, where he developed an interest in AI and did some form of self-study before starting his PhD at NTU School of Computer Science and Engineering under the supervision of Erik Cambria. Weijie started his research in the field of deep reinforcement learning before gaining an interest in NLP applications. His current research goals are faithful natural language explanations and understanding refusal in language models with sparse autoencoders. In his free time, Weijie usually works out in the gym or spends his time watching films.

WEILIANG SEOW
Weiliang received his Bachelor Degree in Materials Science and Engineering from NTU in 2015. After graduation, he was an engineer in the semiconductor and manufacturing industry for 5 years. In 2020, he took a Venture Building Programme under NUS Enterprise. Upon graduating from the programme, he co-founded a startup named Docuf.AI, which performs intelligent data extraction from documents (e.g., invoices, purchase order, packing list) using AI. Today, he is also a part-time PhD student at CCDS under the supervision of Prof Erik Cambria. His main research interests are in the fields of named entity recognition and natural language processing. During his free time, he likes to go jogging and try out nice food.

WIHAN VAN DER HEEVER
Wihan obtained his Masters of Commerce in Advanced Data Analytics at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Concurrent with this, he worked as a data scientist for G3 Business Solutions, a SME focused on stakeholder engagement strategy, research, training, governance and reporting. He came under the supervision of Prof Erik Cambria and joined the Sentic Team at the end of 2022, as a PhD student at NTU CCDS. From mixture models to NLP, Wihan's research interest lies in using statistical methods and knowledge representation to build neurosymbolic AI for socially responsible investing. In his spare time, you might find him reading about philosophy or psychology, hiking to some obscure viewpoint or building his brand via the arts.

JAYANT TEOTIA
Jayant completed his Bachelors’ in mechanical engineering from India Institute of Technology Roorkee. There, as part of a collegiate group, he was Controls Engineer at IITRMS where his team designed an electric F1-styled race car. He was also the official race driver at Formula Bharat competition. Today, Jayant is a PhD student at NTU CCDS under the supervision of Prof Erik Cambria working on multimodal fusion and generalization. Before that, he was a Project Associate at IISc Bangalore, working on object detection and segmentation for three years. His current research focuses on open-vocabulary segmentation using vision language models and detecting learning engagement. In his free time, he enjoys reading, music and playing badminton.

ZIHAO HUANG
Zihao completed his BEng in Computer Science and Technology at Hunan University. He then pursued his Master of Computing in Artificial Intelligence at the National University of Singapore. He is currently a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University under the supervision of Prof. Erik Cambria and Dr. Rui Mao as part of the Sentic Team. His research interests lie in the theory and application of large language models, with a focus on enhancing LLMs using external knowledge sources for applications in finance and retrieval augmented generation. He is also actively exploring the broader potential and practical applications of LLMs and NLP. In his free time, Zihao enjoys playing badminton, yo-yo, and piano.

KIMBERLY LEE
Kimberly is driven by a passion for fashion and a mission to make technology more human-centric, she brings over six years of luxury industry experience and a Master’s degree in Fashion to her technical research. Her work is guided by the philosophy that style and personal identity are inseparable from the technology we wear. Consequently, her PhD research at NTU CCDS lies at the intersection of AI and wearable technology, exploring how deep learning can be embedded in aesthetic wearables such as smart eyewear and biometric apparel without compromising personal style. Beyond her academic and entrepreneurial pursuits, she is an avid traveler who enjoys exploring the intersection of art, global cultures, and technology.

YANHAO JIA
Yanhao is a PhD student at NTU CCDS supervised by Prof Erik Cambria. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Shandong University in 2021 and the University of Chinese Academy of Science in 2024, respectively. Before joining SenticNet, yanhao also did an internship at Shanghai AI Lab in 2022, Peking University in 2023, and A*STAR in 2025, respectively. His research mainly focuses on multimodal spatial intelligence for understanding and generating real-world environments. In his free time, he enjoys city walks and hiking.

YANG SHEN
Yang is a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University, specializing in self-supervised representation learning and spatial reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). He also brings a background in end-to-end speech recognition and representation learning from his time in the industry. Currently, he is exploring the integration of spatial priors and physical commonsense into multimodal frameworks to build more robust and "meaningful" AI systems. In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, cooking, and trying out different types of coffee.

QIANYU ZHAO
Qianyu is a PhD student at NTU CCDS. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology and her master’s degree from Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests lie in multimodal learning, agents, and continual learning. More broadly, she is interested in intelligent systems that integrate perception, reasoning, and adaptation, and in advancing AI toward more flexible and human-centered forms of intelligence. Outside of academia, she enjoys traveling, skiing, exploring film and visual arts, and photography.

KEANE ONG
Keane received his Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering from NUS in 2023. During his undergraduate years, he developed a keen interest in Fintech and AI, completing several projects related to NLP and financial forecasting. Today, he is a PhD student at the NUS Asian Institute of Digital Finance under the Digital Fintech programme co-supervised by Prof Gianmarco Mengaldo from NUS and Prof Erik Cambria from NTU. Keane's current research interests are explainable NLP and deriving strategic market insights with large language models. In his free time, he likes to play soccer, hike and travel.

XINYI WU
Xinyi is a Joint PhD student supervised by Professor Erik Cambria at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Professor Feng-Kuang Chiang at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Her research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Education, with a particular focus on multimodal learning analytics, retrieval-augmented generation, and LLM-powered assessment systems in STEM project-based learning environments. Xinyi is passionate about developing intelligent and explainable tools to support student learning and educational equity. Outside of research, she enjoys classical piano, painting, and designing.

SENTIC TEAM GRADUATES
2025, PhD, Mengshi Ge
2025, PhD, Kelvin Du
2025, PhD, Luyao Zhu
2025, PhD, Cuc Duong
2024, PhD, Xulang Zhang
2024, PhD, Vlad Pandelea
2024, PhD, Ran Zhou
2023, PhD, Jinjie Ni
2023, PhD, Wei Li
2023, PhD, Tom Young
2022, PhD, Qian Chen
2022, PhD, Yosephine Susanto
2021, PhD, Ranjan Satapathy
2020, PhD, Xiaoshi Zhong
2020, PhD, Soujanya Poria
2019, MPhil, Ikhlas Al-hussien
2019, PhD, Haiyun Peng
2018, MPhil, Simone Merello
2018, MPhil, Andrea Picasso
2018, PhD, Sandro Cavallari
2018, PhD, Frank Xing
2018, PhD, Yukun Ma
2017, PhD, Ha-Nguyen Tran

VISITING PROFESSORS
2025, Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)
2025, Paul Pu Liang (MIT Media Lab, USA)
2025, Preslav Nakov (MBZUAI, UAE)
2025, Bing Liu (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
2024, Przemysław Kazienko (Wroclaw Tech, Poland)
2023, Newton Howard (MIT Media Lab, USA)
2022, Luca Oneto (University of Genoa, Italy)
2021, Rafal Rzepka (Hokkaido University, Japan)
2019, Hiroaki Kitano (Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Japan)
2018, Bebo White (Stanford, USA)
2018, Andrew Ortony (Northwestern University, USA)
2018, Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
2017, Amit Sheth (Kno.e.sis, USA)
2017, Andre Possani Espinosa (ITAM, Mexico)
2016, Stefano Squartini (Marche Polytechnic University, Italy)
2015, Andrés Gómez de Silva Garza (ITAM, Mexico)
2014, Alexander Gelbukh (Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico)

JOINING THE TEAM
If you plan to join the Sentic Team, please beware that the way we work is rather unconventional. Like in a jazz band, there are no music sheets and there is no maestro. We'll show you the contour of the tunes we play, but then it's up to you to decide which instrument to pick, what to play, and who to sync with. In other words, we will not tell you what to do, instead we will help you boost your creativity and, ultimately, just express yourself and your ideas.

If you are willing to join us for a short period, consider enrolling in one of NTU global programmes. If you want to join us for a longer period, please apply for PhD at NTU. A good number of scholarships is also available, e.g., SINGA. Finally, if you want to become part of our research staff, you can enquire about vacancies but please note that, for staff hiring, we will be mostly looking at your publication/citation profile so, if you have few/none, we suggest you to consider applying for PhD instead. For postdoc positions, in particular, please note that we will only consider candidates with a 2-digit H-index.

10 GOLDEN SKILLS FOR WORKING WITH US
Please note that we receive dozens of applications for internship, PhD, and staff hiring every month, which forces us to be rather selective. Before contacting us, please beware that we will expect you to:
1) be passionate about AI and affective computing
2) be willing to embrace new challenges with excitement, not fear
3) be aware of recent sentiment analysis literature
4) be rather independent in developing your own ideas
5) know how to write in LaTex (we do not use Word!)
6) know the basics of Python programming
7) have read the textbook Understanding Natural Language Understanding
8) have some basic knowledge of knowledge representation and reasoning
9) have some basic knowledge of deep learning
10) be willing to interact with the rest of the Sentic Team