Doctoral students from the University of Houston’s Computer Science Department are gaining international acclaim for their work in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Dana Alsagheer, Michael Yantosca, and ChengAo Shen have had their research papers accepted as first authors at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna, Austria, a prestigious event in the field.
Dana Alsagheer’s paper, “The Lawyer That Never Thinks: Consistency and Fairness as Keys to Reliable AI,” highlights the importance of consistency and fairness in creating trustworthy AI systems. Michael Yantosca, in collaboration with faculty advisor Albert M. K. Cheng, introduced “Phonotomizer,” a method for real-time, multilingual phonetic segmentation that is both efficient and language-independent, with applications in speech recognition and assistive technologies. ChengAo Shen’s research, “Exploring Multi-Modal Data with Tool-Augmented LLM Agents for Precise Causal Discovery,” demonstrates how large language model agents can improve causal inference in complex data systems.
Lennart Johnsson, interim chair of the Computer Science Department, praised these contributions, noting that they reflect both technical excellence and the University of Houston’s growing influence in global AI research. The department extends congratulations to Alsagheer, Yantosca, Shen, and their faculty advisors for their remarkable achievements.
