Yang Ba

PhD Student @ ASU SCAI

yangba [at] asu [dot] edu

I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Data Science, Analytics and Engineering at Arizona State University, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (ASU SCAI), where I am co-supervised by Dr. Rong Pan and Dr. Michelle V. Mancenido, and worked with the DHS Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (DHS-CAOE). I previously earned my M.S. in Business Analytics from the University of Connecticut.

My research interests span machine learning and generative AI, with a particular focus on large language models (LLMs) and multimodal learning. I investigate synthetic data generation and evaluation, aiming to understand and improve how generative and foundation models learn, represent, and generalize across modalities. My current work explores the benefits and risks of synthetic data, advances model uncertainty quantification, and improves multimodal performance through latent space alignment. Broadly, I seek to advance responsible AI systems through the effective use of synthetic data and model interpretability. Additionally, I have a strong background in statistical data analysis.