12/16/2025 Bruce Adams
CS professor Heng Ji delivered keynote presentations at the ICJAI and EMNLP conferences, the latter of which was described as "a powerful, necessary call for a revolution" in Natural Language Processing research.
Written by Bruce Adams
"No More Processing. Time to Discover" was the title of Heng Ji's keynote address to the EMNLP 2025 – Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, November 4, 2025, in Suzhou, China.
More than 6,000 conference attendees witnessed Ji's talk, a Siebel School of Computing and Data Science professor in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Ji also participated in the panel "Advancing Our Reach: Do's, Don'ts, and Lessons Learned in Interdisciplinary Research".
Reviewing EMNLP, Yashar Mehdad, Technical Director and Principal AI Architect at Airbnb, wrote in Medium on November 14, 2025:
I have to admit that I liked Prof. Heng Ji’s invited talk. I always respected her ambition and her consistent and continuous research agenda. It was an honest and somehow provocative talk. She stood on the main stage and essentially told the entire field it’s “heading in the wrong direction”.
Her message: We are all obsessed with “processing” data. We’re not “discovering” anything new. She warned against work that “merely classifies properties of known drugs” or “generates molecules that are chemically impossible to make”. It was a powerful, necessary call for a revolution.
Ji also gave a keynote, entitled “Science-Inspired AI,” at IJCAI 2025 – 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Montreal, Canada, on August 16, 2025. She took part in the “How Far Are We Away from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)?” alongside Turing Award laureate Professor Yoshua Bengio and others.
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Heng Ji is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science and is affiliated with electrical and computer engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory.