William Wang

Biography

William Wang is the Director of UC Santa Barbara's Natural Language Processing group and Responsible Machine Learning Center. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has published more than 80 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals, and received best paper awards (or nominations) at ASRU 2013, CIKM 2013, EMNLP 2015, and CVPR 2019, a DARPA Young Faculty Award (Class of 2018), a Google Faculty Research Award (2018), three IBM Faculty Awards (2017-2019), two Facebook Research Awards (2018, 2019), an Adobe Research Award in 2018, and the Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in 2011. He frequently serves as an Area Chair for NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. He is an alumnus of Columbia University, and a former research scientist intern of Yahoo! Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, and University of Southern California. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community: his microblog @王威廉 has 100,000+ followers and more than 2,000,000 views each month. His work and opinions appear at major tech media outlets such as Wired, VICE, Scientific American, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.

Research

William has broad interests in machine learning approaches to data science. His group's primary focus is on Natural Language Processing (information extraction, social media, language & vision, spoken language processing), Machine Learning (statistical relational, structure, reinforcement, and deep learning), and Artificial Intelligence (knowledge representation & reasoning, knowledge graphs).