Sameer Singh

Sameer Singh is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, whose work on explaining and testing language models includes the LIME and CheckList methods. He earned a PhD at UMass Amherst in 2014 under Andrew McCallum, worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, and coauthored the LIME paper with Marco Tulio Ribeiro and Carlos Guestrin in 2016. In 2019 he coauthored the DROP reading-comprehension benchmark, and in 2020 the CheckList paper he wrote with Ribeiro, Tongshuang Wu and Carlos Guestrin won the Best Paper Award at ACL 2020. UC Irvine named him a Hellman Fellow in 2020 and gave him its Distinguished Early-Career Faculty Award in 2021, when he also became an AI fellow at the Allen Institute for AI. He co-founded the startup Spiffy, which emerged from stealth in December 2023; the company, now called Envive, raised a $15 million Series A in September 2025, and he is its chief technology officer.

Now at: University of California, Irvine and Envive
Born: 1970
Works: 308
Citations: 40,876
h-index: 57
Badges: Rising
Founder
Bridge
Boomerang
Wayfarer

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

2014

PhD at UMass Amherst

He finishes a PhD in computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2014, supervised by Andrew McCallum. He goes on to a postdoctoral position at the University of Washington.
2016

LIME explains classifier predictions

In 2016, he coauthors “Why Should I Trust You?” with Marco Tulio Ribeiro and Carlos Guestrin. The paper proposes LIME, a technique that explains the predictions of any classifier by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction, and demonstrates it on text and image classification.
2019

The DROP reading benchmark

In 2019, he coauthors the NAACL paper that introduces DROP, with Dheeru Dua, Yizhong Wang, Pradeep Dasigi, Gabriel Stanovsky and Matt Gardner. The crowdsourced benchmark has 55,000 questions that call for discrete operations such as addition, counting and sorting over paragraphs.
2020

Best paper for CheckList

In 2020, “Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList,” which he coauthors with Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Tongshuang Wu and Carlos Guestrin, wins the Best Paper Award at ACL 2020. CheckList is a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models, inspired by behavioral testing in software engineering.
2020–2021

Hellman and early-career awards

In 2020, he is one of five UC Irvine assistant professors named Hellman Fellows for 2020-21; his project develops methods that explain why a complex machine learning algorithm made a certain prediction. In 2021, he receives UC Irvine's Distinguished Early-Career Faculty Award for Research.
2021–2023

AI2 fellow and Spiffy co-founder

He joins the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) as an AI fellow in 2021. Spiffy, a Seattle startup incorporated toward the end of 2022 whose core technology traces its roots to AI2 research, comes out of stealth in December 2023 with him as co-founder and CTO, alongside CEO Aniket Deosthali, chief scientist Iz Beltagy and chief architect Matthew Peters.
September 2025

Envive's $15 million Series A

Envive AI, the company that began as Spiffy, announces a $15 million Series A round led by Fuse VC in September 2025, bringing its total funding to $20 million. He is its CTO.
As of October 2026

UCI professor and Envive co-founder

He is a professor of computer science at UC Irvine, working on the robustness and interpretability of machine learning algorithms and on natural language processing models that reason with text and structure. He is also a co-founder of Envive.