November 25, 2024
Doctoral student David Wan was awarded a 2024 Google PhD Fellowship in natural language processing (NLP). The fellowship covers up to three years of tuition and fees, plus a stipend to be used for living expenses, travel, and personal equipment.
As part of the fellowship, Wan will also be paired with a mentor from Google Research. The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to “recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields.” Students must be nominated by a university, and no university may nominate more than four students. Wan is one of only four fellows selected for NLP in the United States and 12 worldwide (with 26 total winners in the U.S. and 85 worldwide, spread across all 13 computer science research areas).
At the forefront of natural language processing research, Wan develops methods to enhance the reliability of AI language systems. His research introduces new ways to evaluate and improve how these systems generate text and handle multi-modal information, such as combining language with visual data. A key focus of his work is ensuring AI systems produce accurate content that stays true to their source materials.
Wan is part of the Multimodal Understanding, Reasoning, and Generation for Language (MURGe) Lab at UNC, where he is advised by John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor Mohit Bansal. Bansal said of Wan, “David has done extensive work on improving faithfulness, factuality, and grounding of AI models in text and multimodal generation/summarization tasks, as well as in their evaluation! This tackles one of our field’s fundamental challenges of reliable and trustworthy AI. I am delighted to see his contributions recognized with this prestigious fellowship, and I’m excited to see where this support will take his groundbreaking work.”
A full list of 2024 fellows can be found on the Google Research website.