Ph.D. in Machine Learning
Advisor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Thesis Committee: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Judy Hoffman, Munmun De Choudhury, Lauren Wilcox, Jenn Wortman Vaughan, Rich Caruana
Atlanta, GA
Aug. 2019 — Aug. 2024
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), GPA: 3.95/4.00
Majors: Computer Sciences (Honor), Statistics (Honor), Mathematics
Madison, WI
Sept. 2015 — May 2019
Member of Technical Staff, Safety Systems
San Francisco, CA
Aug. 2024 — Present
Design and develop fundamental solutions and interactive tools to enable the safe deployment of the most advanced AI models.
Research Intern, PAIR
New York City, NY
May 2023 — Aug. 2023
Design and develop novel interactive tools to foster responsible AI awareness among people who prototype AI features with large language models.
Research Intern, AI/ML
Seattle, WA
May 2022 — Aug. 2022
Design and develop novel visual analytics tools to help machine translation engineers and researchers evaluate, monitor, and improve their industry-scale models over time.
Research Intern, Responsible AI
Redmond, WA
May 2021 — Aug. 2021
Design and develop novel visualization tools to empower data scientists and domain experts to easily and responsibly improve their ML models by aligning model behaviors with human knowledge and values.
Research Intern, Human–Machine Interaction
Mentor: Liang Gou
Sunnyvale, CA
June 2020 — Aug. 2020
Research and develop explainable machine learning models and visual analytics solutions to help autonomous driving domain experts understand and control adversarial case generation for object recognition.
Ph.D. Researcher, School of Computational Science and Engineering
Mentor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Atlanta, GA
Aug. 2019 — Present
Member of the Polo Club of Data Science where we innovate scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools that amplify human's ability to understand and interact with billion-scale data and machine learning models.
Undergraduate Researcher, John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Center for Research in Virology
Mentor: Anthony Gitter
Madison, WI
Dec. 2017 — Aug. 2019
Classify T-cell and breast cancer cell types using fluorescent images with machine learning classifiers with a gradient of complexity. Interpret feature representations of each classifiers. Analyze about 1 million 5-channel cell-painting images of bone tumor cells. Explore latent space between image space and chemical molecule space.
Undergraduate Researcher, Department of Computer Sciences
Mentor: Michael Gleicher
Madison, WI
Dec. 2018 — June 2019
Design and develop a visual analytics tool for recommender system researchers. Interactively visualized user-item rating matrix with statistics-conditioned sub-sampling to spot abnormal ratings and predictions.
Research Assistant, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Mentor: Yu Hen Hu
Madison, WI
Feb. 2017 — Dec. 2017
Study how to track car driver’s head position and orientation from low-quality traffic video. Develop semi-automatic video annotation software with Viola-Jones frontal face detector for training object tracking algorithms. Implement real-time face tracking algorithms on iOS devices. Train a facial reenactment model using GANs and port it to iOS device.
July 2024
MeMemo receives a Best Short Paper, Honorable Mention Award at SIGIR 2024.
April 2024
Farsight receives a Best Paper, Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2024.
July 2023
DiffusionDB receives a Best Paper, Honorable Mention Award at ACL 2023.
March 2023
A fellowship program to support and amplify emerging leaders in their field and their cutting-edge machine learning research.
Apr. 2022
A fellowship program to support novel and impactful thesis work of PhD students.
Dec. 2021
GAM Changer receives a Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Bridging the Gap: From ML Research to Clinical Practice.
Oct. 2020
People Map receives a Best Poster Research Award, Honorable Mention at IEEE VIS 2020.
May 2019
An award recognizing undergraduate students who have completed an outstanding independent project.
June 2018
A research grant awarded to talented students to undertake more demanding and extensive senior thesis research projects.
June 2017
A research grant awarded to talented students to participate in actual, cutting-edge research.
Aug. 2015 – May 2019
Achieved at least a 3.60 GPA as freshmen and sophomores, a 3.85 GPA as juniors and seniors.
Selected: Latest & Greatest
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2024.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Demo). 2024.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Demo). 2023.
Journal
Matthew Hull, Vivian Pednekar, Hannah Murray, Nimisha Roy, Emmanuel Tung, Susanta Routray, Connor Guerin, Justin Chen, Zijie J. Wang, Seongmin Lee, Mahdi Roozbahani, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). 2023.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). 2023.
Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT). 2023.
Acta Geotech. 2022.
Zijie J. Wang, Robert Turko, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Nilaksh Das, Fred Hohman, Minsuk Kahng, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). 2020.
Journal of Biophotonics. 2019.
Conference
Seongmin Lee, Benjamin Hoover, Hendrik Strobelt, Zijie J. Wang, ShengYun Peng, Austin P. Wright, Kevin Li, Haekyu Park, Haoyang Yang, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2024.
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2024.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). 2023.
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2023.
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2023.
Zijie J. Wang, Chudi Zhong, Rui Xin, Takuya Takagi, Zhi Chen, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Cynthia Rudin, Margo Seltzer
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2022.
David Munechika, Zijie J. Wang, Jack Reidy, Josh Rubin, Krishna Gade, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2022.
Seongmin Lee, Sadia Afroz, Haekyu Park, Zijie J. Wang, Omar Shaikh, Vibhor Sehgal, Ankit Peshin, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2022.
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). 2022.
Nilaksh Das*, Haekyu Park*, Zijie J. Wang, Fred Hohman, Robert Firstman, Emily Rogers, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2020.
Siwei Li, Zhiyan Zhou, Anish Upadhayay, Omar Shaikh, Scott Freitas, Haekyu Park, Zijie J. Wang, Susanta Routray, Matthew Hull, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
The Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). 2020.
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData). 2020.
Extended Abstract
Workshop
Zijie J. Wang, Alex Kale, Harsha Nori, Peter Stella, Mark Nunnally, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Rich Caruana
NeurIPS Workshop on Bridging the Gap: From Machine Learning Research to Clinical Practice (Research2Clinics). 2021.
Demo
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Demo). 2024.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Demo). 2023.
Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference (TheWebConf Demo). 2023.
Sivapriya Vellaichamy, Matthew Hull, Zijie J. Wang, Nilaksh Das, ShengYun Peng, Haekyu Park, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR Demo). 2022.
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR Demo). 2022.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Demo). 2021.
Haekyu Park, Zijie J. Wang, Nilaksh Das, Anindya S. Paul, Pruthvi Perumalla, Zhiyan Zhou, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI Demo). 2021.
Poster Paper
Aeree Cho, Grace C. Kim, Alexander Karpekov, Alec Helbling, Zijie J. Wang, Seongmin Lee, Benjamin Hoover, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS Poster). 2024.
Seongmin Lee, Zijie J. Wang, Aishwarya Chakravarthy, Alec Helbling, ShengYun Peng, Mansi Phute, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Minsuk Kahng
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS Poster). 2024.
International Conference on Learning Representations (Tiny Papers at ICLR). 2024.
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS Poster). 2022.
Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Shaikh, Zijie J. Wang, Austin P. Wright, Sasha Richardson, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS Poster). 2020.
US-11410440-B2. 2020.
Democratizing Human-Centered AI with Visual Explanation and Interactive Guidance
July 2024
OpenAI
Invited
May 2024
Apple
Invited
May 2024
Farsight: Fostering Responsible AI Awareness During AI Application Prototyping
WizMap: Scalable Interactive Visualization for Exploring Large Machine Learning Embeddings
July 2023
Google Research Adaptive AI
Invited
Aug. 2023
DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models
July 2023
GAM Coach: Towards Interactive and User-centered Algorithmic Recourse
Angler: Helping Machine Translation Practitioners Prioritize Model Improvements
TimberTrek: Exploring and Curating Sparse Decision Trees with Interactive Visualization
Oct. 2022
StickyLand: Breaking the Linear Presentation of Computational Notebooks
Budapest Machine Learning Forum
Invited
May 2022
Interpretability, Then What? Editing Machine Learning Models to Reflect Human Knowledge and Values
Aug. 2022
Dec. 2021
Nov. 2021
Sept. 2021
CNN Explainer: Learning Convolutional Neural Networks with Interactive Visualization
April 2023
Aug. 2021
Oct. 2020
Aug. 2020
Classifying T Cell Activity with Convolutional Neural Networks
April 2019
Georgia Tech CoC
May 2024
Georgia Tech CoC
March 2023
Georgia Tech CoC
April 2022
Georgia Tech
Aug. 2021
Georgia Tech CSE
June 2021
Gigazine
Japanese
July 2020
Intel News Byte
April 2020
Co-authored a proposal resulting in $1.2M research funding on enhancing the efficiency and usability of large vision models.
July 2024
A fellowship program to support and amplify emerging leaders in their field and their cutting-edge machine learning research.
March 2023
Co-authored a proposal resulting in $150k research funding on responsible AI from Cisco.
Aug. 2022
A fellowship program to support novel and impactful thesis work of PhD students.
Apr. 2022
My visual analytics research during my internship results in $37,000 gift funding from Bosch.
Jan. 2021
An award recognizing undergraduate students who have completed an outstanding independent project.
May 2019
A research grant awarded to talented students to undertake more demanding and extensive senior thesis research projects.
June 2018
A research grant awarded to talented students to participate in actual, cutting-edge research.
June 2017
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Data & Visual Analytics (CSE 6242), Instructor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Atlanta, GA
Jan. 2023 — May 2023
Lead homework designs for data visualizations, hold weekly office hours, and answer student questions on Piazza. The course had 1124 graduate students enrolled.
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Data & Visual Analytics (CSE 6242), Instructor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Atlanta, GA
Aug. 2020 — Dec. 2020
Lead homework designs for data visualizations, hold weekly office hours, and answer student questions on Piazza. The course had 1277 graduate students enrolled.
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
Computer Graphics (CS 559), Instructor: Michael Gleicher
Madison, WI
Dec. 2018 — May 2019
Create course notes and weekly assignments, hold weekly office hours, and answer student questions on Piazza. The course had 180 undergraduates enrolled.
Notetaker
Madison, WI
Sept. 2016 — May 2019
Provide clearly-written math and statistics notes to students with disability, answer course-related questions.
Academic Coach
Madison, WI
Nov. 2016 — May 2017
Mentor undergraduate students in DDEEA programs for Data Structure course, design two worksheets and provided detailed solutions every week.
Tutor
Madison, WI
Jan. 2016 — Jan. 2017
Instruct peers one-on-one in programming and math problems for three hours weekly, lead review sections to help students study for calculus exams.
CS Undergraduate, Georgia Tech
CS PhD, StanfordAug. 2019 — May 2022
Outstanding Freshman Award (2020)
CS Undergraduate, Georgia Tech
Software Engineer, GoogleAug. 2019 — Aug 2021
Outstanding Senior Award (2021), PURA Travel Award (2020)
Session Chair
Program Committee
Reviewer
ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
Programming
Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, WebAssembly, Rust, Swift, R, Julia, PyTorch, TensorFlow, HTML, CSS, LaTeX, SQL, C++, Git
Design
Affinity Designer, Final Cut Pro, Affinity Photo, Keynote, Sketch, Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop
HCI
Think-aloud protocol, Affinity Diagraming, Cognitive walkthrough, Heuristic evaluation, Rapid Paper Prototyping, User Personas
Polo Chau, Associate Professor
Rich Caruana, Senior Principal Researcher
Jenn Wortman Vaughan, Senior Principal Researcher
Mike Terry, Research Scientist
Liang Gou, Principal Research Scientist