Our Team

  • Yejin Choi

    Yejin Choi

    Senior Research Manager

    Yejin Choi is a Brett Helsel professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and also a senior research manager at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic. Her research interests include commonsense knowledge and reasoning, neural language (de-)generation, language grounding with vision and perception, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of the ACL Test of Time award in 2021, the CVPR Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award) in 2021, the AAAI Outstanding Paper Award (best paper award) in 2020, the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, IEEE AI's 10 to Watch in 2016, and the Marr Prize (best paper award) at ICCV 2013. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University and BS in Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea.

  • Chandra Bhagavatula

    Chandra Bhagavatula

    Lead Research Scientist

    Chandra Bhagavatula is a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. His primary research interests are in commonsense reasoning and natural language generation, with broad interests at the intersection of commonsense and vision. He is a co-recipient of the AAAI Outstanding paper award in 2020. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University in Evanston and B.Tech at the National Institute of Technology (Allahabad) in India.

  • Faeze Brahman

    Faeze Brahman

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    Faeze is a Postdoctoral Young Investigator in the Mosaic team at AI2. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also earned a Master's in Computer Science. She graduated from Iran University of Science and Technology in 2014 with BS and MS degree in Electrical Engineering. She is broadly interested in improving deep learning techniques for natural language understanding, generation, and social commonsense reasoning. Faeze did a research internship with MOSAIC team at AI2 working on rationale generation for non-monotonic reasoning with distant supervision.

  • Khyathi Chandu

    Khyathi Chandu

    Research Scientist

    Khyathi Chandu is a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. She received her Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to CMU, she completed her under-graduation from IIIT-Hyderabad, India.

  • Yuntian Deng

    Yuntian Deng

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    I am a Young Investigator on the Mosaic team (led by Yejin Choi), based in Seattle, WA. In the fall of 2024, I will join the University of Waterloo as an assistant professor. I received my PhD from Harvard University, where I was advised by professors Alexander Rush and Stuart Shieber. My research focuses on natural language processing and machine learning, and I have contributed to various open-source projects, including OpenNMT, openaiwatch.com, Im2LaTeX, LaTeX2Im, and steganography.live.

  • Nouha Dziri

    Nouha Dziri

    Research Scientist

    I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta/Amii working under the supervision of Osmar Zaiane where I focus on developing data-driven approaches for computational natural language understanding, primarily in the context of enabling machines to converse with humans in natural language. My main goals consist in innovating models and creating resources that encourage acquiring trustworthy linguistic abilities as efficiently as humans.

  • Allyson Ettinger

    Allyson Ettinger

    Visiting Research Scientist

    Allyson Ettinger is a Visiting Research Scientist at AI2. She is on leave from the University of Chicago, where she is an assistant professor in the departments of Linguistics and Computer Science. Her research interests include robustness and meaning extraction in NLP, evaluating and disentangling language understanding, knowledge, and reasoning in language models, and modeling language processing in the human brain. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland.

  • Jena Hwang

    Jena Hwang

    Research Scientist

    Jena Hwang is a Research Engineer at AI2. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her broad research interests lie in natural language processing, meaning representation, and commonsense reasoning. Prior to joining AI2, she was a researcher at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, where she collaborated in various NLP related projects. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family, cooking new dishes, and crafting projects like crocheting and sewing.

  • Liwei Jiang

    Liwei Jiang

    Research Intern

    I'm Liwei and I'm currently a PhD student at UW CSE. I'm currently working on logical and pragmatics negations of ATOMIC.

  • Hyunwoo Kim

    Hyunwoo Kim

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    Hyunwoo is a Postdoctoral Young Investigator in the Mosaic team at AI2. His PhD is in Computer Science from Seoul National University, and his research interest is in integrating the social cognitive capabilities of humans into AI. In particular, he is interested in working on social reasoning for large language models. Outside of work, Hyunwoo likes to taste delicious food and watch Formula One.

  • Ronan Le Bras

    Ronan Le Bras

    Senior Research Scientist

    Ronan Le Bras is a Research Scientist at AI2. His research interests include commonsense reasoning through natural language understanding, as well as computational methods for large-scale combinatorial optimization, reasoning, machine learning and human computation. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2016. Prior to his Ph.D., he received his M.S. and B.S. from Ecole Polytechnique Montreal in Computer Engineering and in Software Engineering.

  • Sydney Levine

    Sydney Levine

    Research Scientist

    Sydney Levine is a Research Scientist on AI2’s Mosaic team. Her research uses tools from cognitive science and philosophy to work towards developing ethical AI. She received a PhD in cognitive psychology from Rutgers University and then trained as a postdoc at Harvard and MIT before joining AI2.

  • Bill Yuchen Lin

    Bill Yuchen Lin

    Research Scientist

    Yuchen is a Young Investigator at AI2. He received his PhD from University of Southern California in 2022, advised by Prof. Xiang Ren. He is interested in developing AI systems that can demonstrate a deep understanding of the world with commonsense knowledge and reasoning ability by teaching machines to think, talk, and act as humans do.

  • Ximing Lu

    Ximing Lu

    Predoctoral Young Investigator

    Ximing is a BS/MS combined student at University of Washington in CSE. Her research interest is around natural language processing and computer vision, especially commonsense reasoning in textual and visual context.

    • Bio
      Ximing's Biography
  • Valentina Pyatkin

    Valentina Pyatkin

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    Valentina Pyatkin completed her PhD at Bar-Ilan University, supervised by Prof. Ido Dagan and Prof. Reut Tsarfaty. She received a BA from the University of Zurich and an MSc from The University of Edinburgh. Her research is focused on discourse and semantics, where she aims to represent explicit and implicit relations in discourse.

  • Lianhui (Karen) Qin

    Lianhui (Karen) Qin

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    Karen is a PhD student at the University of Washington in CSE, advised by Yejin Choi. She is working on natural language processing and machine learning, especially commonsense reasoning in text and conversation generation. Outside of work, Karen likes photography and travel.

  • Abhilasha Ravichander

    Abhilasha Ravichander

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    Abhilasha Ravichander is a Young Investigator on the Mosaic team. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in December 2022, and her MS from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. Abhilasha is broadly interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Her research addresses the robustness and interpretability of NLP systems, with a focus on analyzing, evaluating, and improving models and datasets. Outside of work, she is enthusiastic about coffee, books, traveling, and she enjoys nurturing tropical plants in her apartment.

  • Xiang Ren

    Xiang Ren

    Visiting Research Scientist

    I currently hold a visiting research scientist position at AI2, working on machine common sense. I'm an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair at USC, where I'm the PI of the Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Research Lab. I also hold appointment as a Research Team Leader in Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and serve as a member of the USC NLP Group, USC Machine Learning Center and ISI Center on Knowledge Graphs. Previously I was a Data Science Advisor at Snapchat. Prior to USC, I did my PhD work in computer science at UIUC. I've also spent time with the NLP group and the SNAP group at the Stanford University.

  • Maarten Sap

    Maarten Sap

    Visiting Research Scientist

    I am a visiting research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and an assistant professor at CMU's LTI department. My research focuses on endowing NLP systems with social intelligence and social commonsense, and understanding social inequality and bias in language. I received my PhD from the University of Washington where I was advised by Noah Smith and Yejin Choi, and have interned at AI2 working on social commonsense reasoning, and at Microsoft Research working on deep learning models for understanding human cognition.

  • Sean Welleck

    Sean Welleck

    Postdoctoral Young Investigator

    Sean Welleck is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UW and Postdoctoral Young Investigator at AI2. His research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and structured prediction. He received his PhD in Computer Science from New York University, advised by Kyunghyun Cho and Zheng Zhang. Apart from research, he enjoys running, reading, and mathematics.

Highlighted Past Interns