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Ting Cai

Computer Sciences

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Email: tingcai [at] cs.wisc.edu

Google Scholar

I am a fifth-year CS Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Prof. AnHai Doan. My research interests lie in the intersection of data science and machine learning. I am currently working on building efficient data management system using Large Language Models.

Before 2023 Fall, I worked with Prof. Kirthevasan Kandasamy on Active Learning and Multi-armed Bandits. I obtained my Bachelor's degree with honors in Data Science and Analytics from National University of Singapore in 2020. In 2020-2021, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Vincent Y. F. Tan on Machine Learning with a focus on Nonnegative Matrix Factorization.

Publications

  • Columbo: Expanding Abbreviated Column Names for Tabular Data Using Large Language Models
    Ting Cai, Stephen Sheen, AnHai Doan
    In Findings of EMNLP 2025
    [arXiv]

  • Transformer-based automated segmentation of recycling materials for semantic understanding in construction
    Xin Wang, Wei Han, Sicheng Mo, Ting Cai, Yijing Gong, Yin Li, Zhenhua Zhu
    In Automation in Construction 2023
    1st place in VIMS-IAARC Joint Datathon 2022 Competition
    [Paper]

  • Active Cost-aware Labeling of Streaming Data
    Ting Cai, Kirthevasan Kandasamy
    In AISTATS 2023
    [Paper] [Code]

  • Adversarially-Trained Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
    Ting Cai, Vincant Y. F. Tan, Cédric Févotte
    In IEEE Signal Processing Letters 2021
    [Paper] [Code] [Slides]

Work Experience

  • Adobe (May 2025 - Aug 2025)
    Machine Learning Engineer Intern, California

  • National University of Singapore (Jun 2020 - Aug 2021)
    Research Assistant, Singapore

  • Sprim Inc. (Feb 2020 - May 2020)
    Data Science Intern, Singapore

  • HP Inc. (Aug 2018 - Dec 2018)
    Data Science Intern, Singapore

  • Wish Inc. (May 2018 - Aug 2018)
    Data Science Intern, Shanghai, China

Services and Awards

  • Reviewer: AISTATS, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, TMLR, AAAI, IJCAI, Artificial Intelligence

  • External Reviewer: Journal of Data and Information Quality

  • SIGMOD Travel Award

Courses Taken

  • Data Integration, Database Management, Large Language Models, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Statistics, Big Data System, Operating System, Compiler, Algorithm Design

Teaching 🎙

  • [TA] CS 536 Introduction to Programming Languages and Compilers: Spring 2024

  • [TA] CS 354 Introduction to Computer Systems: Summer 2022

  • [TA] CS 252 Introduction to Computer Engineering: Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022

Hobby

  • I like Hip-Hop!