Sean Ren

Sean (Xiang) Ren is a distinguished researcher and educator in the field of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, currently serving as a Cofounder of Sahara AI, a decentralized AI blockchain platform, since May 2023. At the University of Southern California, Sean has held the position of Associate Professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair in the Computer Science Department since December 2017. Additionally, Sean is a Research Team Leader at the Information Sciences Institute and has been involved as Information Director for ACM SIGKDD & Annual KDD Conference since September 2018. Sean directs The Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Lab and has contributed as a Visiting Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI from April 2022 to March 2024. Previous experiences include serving as a Data Science Advisor at Snap Inc. and recognition as part of Forbes' Asia 30 Under 30 in 2019. Sean holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Zhejiang University.