CSE PhD Student Wins College of Engineering Graduate Award

Xiang (Tommy) Yue, a Computer Science and Engineering PhD candidate working with Prof. Huan Sun, has been awarded the 2023 College of Engineering Graduate Award for Exemplary Graduate Student Researcher. His research includes applying artificial intelligence (AI) to other science disciplines.

“Thanks so much for the award! This recognition means a lot to me, and I am truly honored to receive it! I would like to thank the selection committee for taking the time to review my application and for recognizing the value of my research. I will strive to continue producing meaningful research that contributes to my field,” Yue said.
 

Prof. Sun added: “Yue’s achievements in research and publication have been truly outstanding, and his commitment to interdisciplinary research is particularly noteworthy. He has demonstrated a deep understanding of the importance of collaboration across different disciplines, and his work applying AI and natural language processing (NLP) to other fields (e.g., privacy and healthcare) has yielded exciting results.”

In addition to his impressive research accomplishments, Yue has been recognized as a generous and dedicated mentor to younger students. His guidance and support have helped many students succeed in their own research pursuits.
 
Yue has broad research interests in natural language processing. Specifically, his research aims to build safe and responsible language models (LMs) which 1) ensure faithfulness to factual world knowledge and truth, 2) generalize well to various unseen environments, and 3) safeguard user data privacy. He has extensive experience building LMs for different applications (e.g., Question Answering). 

Natural language processing is a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with giving computers the ability to understand the way humans speak and write.

Yue has published more than 20 peer-reviewed research papers, among which eight are first-author on top conferences or journals, and has over 1000 citations according to Google Scholar. He won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE BIBM 2021 conference.