UW CSE is delighted to announce our first two hires of the 2014 faculty recruiting season.
Yejin Choi, currently Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, will be joining UW CSE this fall. Yejin is a rising star in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on studying non-literal and contextual language understanding. Her work on automatically analyzing writing style – e.g., to detect deceptive online reviews or predict the success of a novel – has gained significant academic and media attention. She is also a leader in combining NLP and computer vision – studying the automatic captioning of photographs – and was a co-recipient the 2013 David Marr Prize for this work. Yejin received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and her B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University. (Yejin joins CSE along with Noah Smith, currently Finmeccania Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute, at Carnegie Mellon University and also an expert in natural language processing – more details here. The addition of Yejin and Noah to Luke Zettlemoyer and others already on campus creates a world-class NLP group at the University of Washington.)
Franzi Roesner, a researcher in security and privacy with a strong focus on system design, also will be joining UW CSE as a faculty member in the fall. Her research has included the creation of novel defenses against third-party personal tracking on the Web, new approaches to permission granting in modern operating systems (particularly mobile devices, such as smartphones), and security for emerging augmented reality technologies. Franzi will receive her Ph.D. from UW CSE in June. She received her B.S. in Computer Science at UT Austin, where she worked on research in computer architecture.
Welcome, Yejin and Franzi!!