Biography:Yejin Choi

From HandWiki
Yejin Choi
최예진
Born1977
Alma materSeoul National University (BS)
Cornell University (PhD)
AwardsMacArthur Fellow (2022)
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Washington
Stony Brook University
ThesisFine-grained opinion analysis : structure-aware approaches (2010)
Template:Infobox Korean name/auto
WebsiteNo URL found. Please specify a URL here or add one to Wikidata.

Yejin Choi (Korean최예진; born 1977)[1] is the Dieter Schwarz Foundation Professor and Senior Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) respectively.[2] Her research considers natural language processing and computer vision.

Early life and education

Choi is from South Korea. She attended Seoul National University.[3] After earning a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Choi moved to the United States, where she joined Cornell University as a graduate student. There she worked with Claire Cardie on natural language processing. After earning her doctorate, Choi joined Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science.[4] At Stony Brook University Choi developed a statistical technique to identify fake hotel reviews.[5]

Research and career

In 2018 Choi joined the Allen Institute for AI.[6] Her research looks to endow computers with a statistical understanding of written language.[7] She became interested in neural networks and their application in artificial intelligence. She started to assemble a knowledge base that became known as the atlas of machine commonsense (ATOMIC). By the time she had finished the creation of ATOMIC, the language model generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) had been released.[8] ATOMIC does not make use of linguistic rules, but combines the representations of different languages within a neural network.[8]

In 2020, Choi was endowed with the Brett Helsel Professorship, which she held until she became Chair of Computer Science in 2023.[9][10] She has since made use of Commonsense Transformers (COMET) with Good old fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI). The approach combines symbolic reasoning and neural networks.[8] She has developed computational models that can detect biases in language that work against people from underrepresented groups.[11] For example, one study demonstrated that female film characters are portrayed as less powerful than their male counterparts.[7]

In 2023, Choi became The Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science.[10] Choi is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.[12]

In 2025, Stanford HAI announced the appointment of Choi as senior fellow and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation HAI Professor and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.[13]

Awards and honours

Select publications

References

  1. "University of Washington computer science professor Yejin Choi wins $800K 'genius grant' – GeekWire". 12 October 2022. https://www.geekwire.com/2022/university-of-washington-computer-science-professor-yejin-choi-wins-800k-genius-grant/. 
  2. "Yejin Choi's Profile". Stanford Profiles. https://profiles.stanford.edu/yejin-choi. 
  3. "Yejin Choi" (in en). https://hai.stanford.edu/people/yejin-choi. 
  4. "Yejin Choi". https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ychoi/papersbytopic.html. 
  5. "Asian American: Yejin Choi Devises Method to Detect Fake Reviews Goldsea". http://goldsea.com/Text/index.php?id=13186. 
  6. "Mosaic - People". https://mosaic.allenai.org/people. 
  7. 7.0 7.1 Snyder, Alison (15 March 2018). "Trying to give AI some common sense" (in en). https://www.axios.com/the-quest-to-give-ai-some-common-sense-1521085175-25824f2a-b019-4223-9288-e7810704fd08.html. 
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 "Common Sense Comes to Computers" (in en). 30 April 2020. https://www.quantamagazine.org/common-sense-comes-to-computers-20200430/. 
  9. "Endowment for Faculty Excellence | Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering". https://www.cs.washington.edu/supportcse/faculty. 
  10. 10.0 10.1 "The Wissner-Slivka Chair". https://www.cs.washington.edu/supportcse/faculty/wissner-slivka_chair. 
  11. 11.0 11.1 "Anita Borg Award (BECA) - CRA-WP" (in en-US). https://cra.org/cra-wp/scholarships-and-awards/awards/beca-award-program/. 
  12. Dillet, Romain (2023-11-17). "Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/kyutai-is-an-french-ai-research-lab-with-a-330-million-budget-that-will-make-everything-open-source/. 
  13. "NVIDIA's Yejin Choi Joins Stanford HAI". https://hai.stanford.edu/news/nvidias-yejin-choi-joins-stanford-hai. 
  14. 14.0 14.1 Zeng, Daniel. "AI's 10 to Watch". https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yejin/Papers/IEEE-AI-10-to-Watch.pdf. 
  15. "Yejin Choi (Cornell CS PhD '10) won the Marr Prize for her paper "From Large Scale Image Categorization to Entry-Level Categories" | Department of Computer Science". https://www.cs.cornell.edu/information/news/newsitem787/yejin-choi-cornell-cs-phd-10-won-marr-prize-her-paper-large-scale-image. 
  16. "Announcing the Winners of the Facebook ParlAI Research Awards" (in en-US). 2017-10-18. https://research.fb.com/blog/2017/10/announcing-the-winners-of-the-facebook-parlai-research-awards/. 
  17. "AAAI Outstanding Paper Award". https://aaai.org/Awards/paper.php. 
  18. "NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award". 30 November 2021. https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/11/30/announcing-the-neurips-2021-award-recipients/. 
  19. "ACL Test-of-time Paper Award". https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2021-acl-test-time-paper-award. 
  20. "CVPR Longuet-Higgins Prize". https://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/node/330. 
  21. "NAACL Outstanding Paper Award". 29 June 2022. https://2022.naacl.org/blog/best-papers/. 
  22. "ICML Outstanding Paper Award". https://icml.cc/virtual/2022/awards_detail. 
  23. Blair, Elizabeth (12 October 2022). "An ornithologist, a cellist and a human rights activist: the 2022 MacArthur Fellows". https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128352140/2022-macarthur-fellows-genius-grants. 
  24. "ACL Outstanding Paper Award". https://2023.aclweb.org/program/best_papers/. 
  25. "Yejin Choi: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023". Time. https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6311114/yejin-choi/. 
  26. "Best Papers - EMNLP 2023". Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. https://2023.emnlp.org/program/best_papers/. 
  27. "Awards - ACL 2025". https://2025.aclweb.org/program/awards/. 
  28. "Awards - ACL 2025". Association for Computational Linguistics. https://2025.aclweb.org/program/awards/#best-demo. 
  29. "Yejin Choi: The 100 Most Influential People in 2025". Time. https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305803/yejin-choi/.