About Me

Introduction

Hi there! I am a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working with Prof. Shaowen Wang (advisor) and Prof. Jiawei Han. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from Florida International University (FIU), advised by Prof. Giri Narasimhan. I was a Research Fellow in NSF LEAP at Columbia University. My research focuses on developing and applying AI-driven approaches to tackle real-world challenges in Natural Sciences, advancing environmental sustainability. Sincere gratitude to NSF I-GUIDE for consistent support.

[Highlights] The proposed Dual Cascaded Neural Networks for coastal flood prediction and management has been featured by FIU News and selected as The Year in Science: The most impactful research stories of 2025, and featured by South Florida Business Journal. This work was also presented to Florida House Natural Resources & Disasters Subcommittee [video]. The Diffusion Model for weather prediction work was presented to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I have been selected for the Geospatial World Rising Stars 2026 (50 finalists / year worldwide). Meanwhile, I am leading the I-GUIDE Climbers group, an integrative team consisting of 15+ postdocs and students spanning AI, data science, geography, hydrology, climate, agriculture, education, etc.

[Job Hunting] I am on the job market starting in Summer 2026. If you believe I might be a good fit for your institution or organization, I’d love to connect! — please feel free to reach out at jimeng8[AT]illinois.edu.

Research Interests

• AI for Science and Engineering
• Environment: flood prediction (WaLeF, ReFine), flood mitigation (FIDLAr), explainable AI (TimeX++).
• Climate: diffusion model for weather prediction (CoDiCast), foundation models for weather (Survey)
• Data Mining to Boost LLMs
• Retrieval and Structuring: Structured RAG (HyperCube-RAG, MultiCube-RAG, TaSR-RAG)
• In-domain Foundation Models: Benchmark (Water-Bench), Retrieval-Augmention Forecast (Water-RAF)
• Agentic AI & Reinforcement Learning
• Multi-Agent: MultiCube-RAG, PyRAG
• Reinforcement Learning: PyRAG

Selected Publications [Full List]

• MultiCube-RAG for Multi-hop Question Answering
  Jimeng Shi, Wei Hu, Runchu Tian, Bowen Jin, Wonbin Kweon, SeongKu Kang, Yunfan Kang, Dingqi Ye, Sizhe Zhou, Shaowen Wang, Jiawei Han
  (Under review)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• Hypercube-RAG: Hypercube Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Question-Answering
  Jimeng Shi, Sizhe Zhou, Bowen Jin, Wei Hu, Runchu Tian, Shaowen Wang, Giri Narasimhan, Jiawei Han
  (Under review)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• Retrieval is Cheap, Show Me the Code: Executable Multi-Hop Reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  Jiashuo Sun^*, Jimeng Shi^*, Yixuan Xie, Saizhuo Wang, Jash Pajesh Parekh, Pengcheng Jiang, Zhiyi Shi, Jiajun Fan, Qinglong Zheng, Peiran Li, Shaowen Wang, Ge Liu, Jiawei Han
  (Under review)
  [PDF] [Code] [Project Page]
  
  
• Deep Learning and Foundation Models for Weather Prediction: A Survey
  Jimeng Shi, Azam Shirali, Bowen Jin, Sizhe Zhou, Wei Hu, Rahuul Rangaraj, Zhaonan Wang, Yanzhao Wu, Leonardo Bobadilla, Upmanu Lall, Shaowen Wang, Jiawei Han, Giri Narasimhan
  The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2026)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• Retrieval-Augmented Foundation Models for Water Level Prediction in the Everglades
  Rahuul Rangaraj^*, Jimeng Shi^*,#, Rajendra Paudel, Giri Narasimhan^#, Yanzhao Wu^#
  The 32nd SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2026)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• FIDLAR: Forecast-Informed Deep Learning Approaches for Flood Mitigation
  Jimeng Shi, Zeda Yin, Arturo Leon, Jayantha Obeysekera, Giri Narasimhan
  The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025) (Oral)
  [PDF] [Code] [Reported to Florida House Natural Resources & Disasters Subcommittee]
  
  
• CoDiCast: Conditional Diffusion Model for Weather Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification
  Jimeng Shi, Bowen Jin, Jiawei Han, Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan, Giri Narasimhan
  The 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025) (Oral)
  [PDF] [Code] [Highlighted by U.S. National Science Foundation]
  
  
• Deep Learning Models for Water Level Prediction in South Florida
  Jimeng Shi, Zeda Yin, Rukmangadh Myana, Arturo Leon, Jayantha Obeysekera, Giri Narasimhan
  Journal of water resources planning and management, 151(10)
  [PDF] [Code] [Media: The Year in Science: The most impactful research stories of 2025]
  
  
• ReFine: Boosting Time Series Prediction Under Extreme Events by Reweighting and Fine-tuning
  Jimeng Shi, Azam Shirali, Giri Narasimhan.
  2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2024) (Oral)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• The Power of Explainability in Forecast-Informed Deep Learning Models for Flood Mitigation
  Jimeng Shi, Vitalii Stebliankin, Giri Narasimhan
  NeurIPS 2023 workshop on Climate Change AI
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• Graph Transformer Network for Flood Forecasting with Heterogeneous Covariates
  Jimeng Shi, Vitalii Stebliankin, Zhaonan Wang, Shaowen Wang, Giri Narasimhan
  NSF I-GUIDE Forum in New York, 2023 (Oral)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• TimeX++: Learning Time-Series Explanations with Information Bottleneck
  Zichuan Liu, Tianchun Wang, Jimeng Shi, Xu Zheng, Zhuomin Chen, Lei Song, Wenqian Dong, Jayantha Obeysekera, Farhad Shirani, Dongsheng Luo
  The 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)
  [PDF] [Code]
  
  
• Evaluating protein binding interfaces with transformer networks
  Vitalii Stebliankin, Azam Shirali, Prabin Baral, Jimeng Shi, Prem Chapagain, Kalai Mathee, Giri Narasimhan
  Nature Machine Intelligence (IF=25.89)
  [PDF] [Codes] [Media]
  

Professional Services

• Program Committee Member
• AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026
• The Web Conference (WWW) Web4Good, 2026
• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2025, 2026
• European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2025
• European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), 2023, 2024, 2025
• International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2026
• Paper Reviewer
• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026
• International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025, 2026
• SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024, 2026
• NeurIPS Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, 2024
• ICLR Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, 2024, 2025
• Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
• IEEE Transactions on Big Data, 2025
• Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 2021, 2022
• Volunteer
• Helped to organize the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Southeast USA Regional Contest at Florida International University (2022, 2023, 2024)
• Helped to organize the High School Programming Contest at Florida International University (2025)