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Photo credit: Matt Hagen


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Yejin Choi

Wissner-Slivka Chair
MacArthur Fellow

 Office: 578 Allen Center
Fax: 206-685-2969
email: yejin@cs.washington.edu
    Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
    University of Washington
    Box 352350
    185 E Stevens Way NE
    Seattle, WA 98195-2350
   


News:

- I am now with NVIDIA as a senior director 💚
- Starting in 2025, I'll join Stanford as Senior Fellow at HAI and Professor in CS

- Named among Time100 Most Influential People in AI
- Podcast "Unconfuse Me" with Bill Gates: Full episode here (audio-only) and Youtube highlights here (videos)
- A TED talk: "Why AI is Incredibly Smart --- and Shockingly Stupid"
- MacArthur Fellow (class of 2022); 2 min YouTube reel →here
- Keynote at ACL: "2082: An ACL Odyssey: The Dark Matter of Language and Intelligence" along with a fireside chat on "The Trajectory of ACL and the Next 60 years" and a pre-recorded talk →here
- An invited article, "The Curious Case of Commonsense Intelligence" for the Daedalus's special issue on AI & Society
- A podcast interview with the Gradient on commonsense and morality
- Featured by New Yorker: "Can Computers Learn Common Sense?"
- The TWIML AI Podcast with Sam Charrington on "Why is language the best medium for reasoning?"
- An interview by Dhruv Batra on Humans of AI: Stories, Not Stats
- Featured by NY Times on Delphi: "Can a Machine Learn Morality?"
- Promoted to a full professor as of Apr 2021, the new title effective on Sep 2021
- Endowed with the Brett Helsel Career Development Professorship (2020 - 2023)
- Won the AAAI Outstanding Paper Award 2020
- Featured by Quanta Magazine --- 🤖"Common Sense Comes Closer to Computers"🤖
- Our UW Sounding Board team is the winnner of the Alexa Prize!
- Our UW team (with Pooja, Max, Ari) won the Facebook ParlAI award!

Awards:

Best/Outstanding Paper Awards:
     - Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2023
     - Best Paper Award at ACL 2023
     - Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023
     - Outstanding Paper Award at ICML 2022
     - Best Paper Award at NAACL 2022
     - Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2021
     - Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2020
     - Marr Prize at ICCV 2013
Test of Time:
     - Longuet Higgins Prize at CVPR 2021
     - Test of Time Award at ACL 2021
Finalists:
     - IROS RoboCup Best Paper Finalist at IROS 2019
     - Best Paper Nomination at ACL 2019

Recognition:

- Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford (2023)
- Wissner-Slivka Chair (2023 - current)
- MacArthur Fellow (2022)
- ACL Fellow (2022)
- Brett Helsel Career Development Professorship (2020 - 2023)
- Borg Early Career Award (BECA) (2018)
- IEEE AI's 10 to Watch (2016)

Recent Talks (2018 - 2024):

Oct 2024 Talk at the the Simons Institute Workshop: Alignment, Trust, Watermarking, and Copyright Issues in LLMs --- due to a scheduling challenge, Taylor Sorensen will present instead
Sep 2024 Talk at the Simons Institute Workshop: Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part 1 Boot Camp
Jun 2024 Keynote at the DataBricks' Data+AI Summit
May 2024 Keynote at MLSys
May 2024 Keynote at the ICLR Workshop on How Far Are We From AGI?
Mar 2024 Keynote at the Weinberg Cognitive Science Symposium
Mar 2024 Colloquium at Harvard Psychology
Dec 2023 Organizing a NeurIPS Workshop -- 🐌 AI Meets Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology 🦋
Dec 2023 Talk at the NeurIPS Workshop -- Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR)
Nov 2023 Talk at UC Irvine
Nov 2023 Talk at UCSD
Nov 2023 Talk at MIT EECS
Nov 2023 Colloquium at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS)
Nov 2023 Distinguished Lecture at UBC
Oct 2023 Talk at the MacArthuer Fellows Forum
Oct 2023 Distinguished Lecture at TTIC
Oct 2023 Talk at the Ohio State University
Sep 2023 Talk at the Department of Philosophy at NYU
Sep 2023 Talk at Cornell Tech
Sep 2023 Talk at MSR @ NYC
Aug 2023 Keynote at VLDB
Aug 2023 Talk at the Simons Institute Workshop on LLMs with the recorded talk →here
Aug 2023 Talk at Duolingo
Jun 2023 Keynote at CVPR
Jun 2023 Talk at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford with the recorded talk →here
May 2023 Keynote at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)
May 2023 Talk at MPI Tubingen
May 2023 Talk at the Caltech Class on Large Language and Vision Models
May 2023 Talk at the Institute for Assured Autonomy at Johns Hopkins University
May 2023 Talk at Harvard ML Foundations Seminar Series
May 2023 SAIL Distinguished Lecture at Stanford
Apr 2023 Talk at TED with the recorded talk →here
Mar 2023 Talk at AI For Tigray --- cancelled
Mar 2023 Colloquium at Berkeley
Mar 2023 Guest Lecture at the Stanford MLSys seminar co listed with Stanford CS324A: Advances in Foundation Models
Feb 2023 Guest Lecture at the Stanford CS25: Transformers United V2
Feb 2023 Talk at the Continual Causality AAAI bridge program
Jan 2023 Talk at IBM Workshop on Neuro-Symbolic AI
Jan 2023 Talk at ALPS, the NLP winter school
Dec 2022 Panel at AI Debate 3 with the recorded talk →here
Dec 2022 Talk at the NeurIPS workshop on Robustness in Sequence Modeling
Nov 2022 Talk at SoCal NLP Symposium with the recorded talk →here
Nov 2022 Talk at AI2050
Oct 2022 Colloquium at Hebrew University
Oct 2022 YanDex Distinguished Lecture at Tel-Aviv University
Oct 2022 Panel at Microsoft Research Summit on What’s next in large-scale AI
Oct 2022 Tutorial at COLING on NS4NLP: Neuro-Symbolic Modeling for NLP
Sep 2022 Keynote at Interspeech with the recorded talk →here
Sep 2022 Talk at the Simons Foundation Symposium on New Directions in Theoretical Machine Learning
Sep 2022 Talk at Penn State University
Sep 2022 Keynote at the 19th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2022)
July 2022 Keynote at the NAACL Workshop on Narrative Understanding
May 2022 Keynote ACL "2082: An ACL Odyssey: The Dark Matter of Language and Intelligence"
and a fireside chat on "The Trajectory of ACL and the Next 60 years" with the pre-recorded talk →here
May 2022 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures
Apr 2022 Panel on "Ethics, Safety, and AI: Can we have it all?" at the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence
Mar 2022 Distinguished Lecture at Microsoft Research
Mar 2022 Keynote at the AAAI Spring Symposium on Ethical Computing: Metrics for Measuring AI’s Proficiency and Competency for Ethical Reasoning
Mar 2022 Distinguished Lecture at Max Planck Institute
Feb 2022 Keynote at WSDM
Dec 2021 Keynote at the NeurIPS workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP)
Dec 2021 Keynote at the NeurIPS workshop on CtrlGen: Controllable Generative Modeling in Language and Vision
Nov 2021 Talk at the SNU AI Policy Initiative, SAPI
Nov 2021 Talk at the University of Texas Austin
Nov 2021 Keynote at the EMNLP workshop on Novel Ideas in Learning-to-Learn through Interaction (NILLI)
Oct 2021 Panel at Microsoft Research Summit on Large-scale Neural Platform Models: Opportunities, Concerns, and Directions
Oct 2021 Colloquium at UPenn
Oct 2021 Talk at Georgia Tech: "Knowledge is Power: Symbolic Knowledge Distillation, Commonsense Morality, and Multimodal Script Knowledge"
Aug 2021 Keynote at the Stanford FORUM Workshop on Universal Models: "David V.S. Goliath: the Art of Leaderboarding in the Era of Extreme-Scale Neural Models" with the recorded talk →here and the panel →here
Aug 2021 Panel at the ACL workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Jul 2021 Distinguished Lecture at Sony
Jun 2021 Keynote at the NAACL workshop on Visually Grounded Interaction and Language (ViGIL)
Jun 2021 Keynote at the NAACL workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)
May 2021 Keynote at the ICLR workshop on Workshop on Enormous Language Models (WELM): "David V.S. Goliath in the Era of Gigantic Neural Networks"
May 2021 Keynote at ICLR: "Commonsense AI: Myth and Truth"
Apr 2021 Keynote at WebConf (formerly WWW)
Mar 2021 Talk at Facebook AI
Feb 2021 Keynote at the 1st ELLIS NLP Symposium with a recorded talk →here
Feb 2021 Keynote at the AAAI Workshop on Commonsense Knowledge Graphs
Jan 2021 Teaching at the ALPS Winter School with recorded lectures →here
Jan 2021 Talk at UCL Dark Lab with a recorded talk →here
Dec 2020 Panel at AI Debate 2 at Montreal.ai with a recorded talk →here (my 3 min pitch) and →here (the whole 3.5 hr debate)
Dec 2020 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning -- Theory and Practice
Dec 2020 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on Dataset Curation and Security
Dec 2020 Talk at ByteDance
Nov 2020 Keynote at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Abstraction and Analogy
Nov 2020 Talk at the Distinguished Lecture Series at NSF CISE on "Intuitive Reasoning as (Un)supervised Neural Generation"
Nov 2020 Talk at MIT CSAIL Embodied Intelligence with a recorded talk →here
Oct 2020 Keynote at the Fall Stanford Human-Centered AI (HAI) Conference on Triangulating Intelligence: Melding Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI with a recorded talk →here (from 28:00 to 53:00)
Oct 2020 Distinguished Lecture (Department Colloquium) at Columbia University
Oct 2020 Colloquium at CMU LTI with a recorded talk →here
Oct 2020 Colloquium at University of Maryland CLIP
Oct 2020 Keynote at the Amazon ML Conference 2020
Oct 2020 Talk at Amazon AI
Sep 2020 Talk at SNU Data Science
Aug 2020 Keynote at the ECCV Workshop on Video Turing Test (VTT): Toward Human-Level Video Story Understanding with a pre-recorded talk →here
Aug 2020 Keynote at CIFAR Deep Learning Seminar Summer School with a pre-recorded talk →here
Jul 2020 ACL Tutorial on Commonsense with a recorded talk →here
Jul 2020 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Multimodal Language
Jul 2020 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Fact Extraction and Verification (FEVER) with a recorded talk →here
Jun 2020 CVPR tutorial on Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning and Program Synthesis with a recorded talk →here
Jun 2020 Keynote at the Workshop on Symbolic-Neural Learning (SNL-2020) --- cancelled until 2021
Apr 2020 Panel at the ICLR Workshop on Bridging Cognitive Science and AI (BAICS)
Feb 2020 Keynote at the AAAI Workshop on Statistical Relational AI (StarAI)
Dec 2019 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on KR2ML - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Meets Machine Learning
Dec 2019 Keynote at the Neurips Workshop on Learning with Rich Experience: Integration of Learning Paradigms
Nov 2019 Keynote at the Natural Language, Dialog and Speech (NDS) Symposium @ the New York Academy of Sciences
Nov 2019 Keynote at the EMNLP Workshop on COmmonsense INference in NLP (COIN)
Nov 2019 Keynote at the ICCV Workshop on Extreme Vision Modeling
Nov 2019 Keynote at the ICCV Workshop on Scene Graph Representation and Learning
Nov 2019 Keynote at the ICCV Workshop on Closing the Loop Between Vision and Language (CLVL)
Oct 2019 Talk at UIUC   +   TTIC   +   Northwestern
Aug 2019 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Conversational AI (ConvAI): "The Curious Case of Neural Conversation Degeneration"
July 2019 Panel at MSR Faculty Summit on the Future of Work   +   Keynote at KCCV
Jun 2019 Keynote at the NAACL Workshop onNeuralGen : "The Enigma of Neural Text Degeneration as the First Defense to Neural Fake News."
May 2019 Keynote at AKBC   +   Elemental Cognition   +   IBM Research: "From Atomic to Comet: Commonsense AKBC."
July 2018 Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
July 2018 Keynote at LxMLS Lisbon Machine Learning School
Jun 2018 Keynote at the CVPR Workshop on Visual Question Answering
Jun 2018 Keynote at the NAACL Workshop on Generalization in Deep Learning: ``Why NLU Doesn't Generalize Well to NLG.''
Apr 2018 Keynote at NW-NLP: recorded talk →here
Feb 2018 Keynote at AAAI

Research Interests:

My primary research interests are in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, with broader interests in Computer Vision and Digital Humanities.

Language and X ∈ {vision, knowledge, world, mind, society...} : Intelligent communication requires the ability to read between the lines and to reason beyond what is said explicitly. My recent research has been under two broad themes: (i) learning the contextual, grounded meaning of language from various contexts in which language is used — both physical (e.g., visual) and abstract (e.g., social, cognitive), and (ii) learning the background knowledge about how the world works, latent in large-scale multimodal data. More specifically, my research interests include:

Recent Preprints:

Recent Publications (2016 - 2024):

Selected Publications (2011 - 2015):

Full List of Publications:

Recent Teaching:

xlab:

Short Bio:

    Yejin Choi is Wissner-Slivka Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research investigates a wide variety problems across NLP and AI including fundamental limits and capabilities of large language models, alternative training recipes for small language models, neuro-symbolic fusion, commonsense knowledge and reasoning, moral norms and values, pluralistic alignment, and AI safety. She is a MacArthur Fellow, named among Time100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, and a co-recipient of 2 Test-of-Time Awards (ACL 2021 and CVPR 2021) and 8 Best and Outstanding Paper Awards at ICCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP and AAAI. She has also won the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, and IEEE AI's 10 to Watch in 2016. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University and BS in Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea.

Personal:

    Scuba!