Congratulations to assistant professor Nanyun (Violet) Peng who just received the 2023 Okawa Research Grant. Professor Peng is among the seven recipients from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon. The Award funds her research on Detecting and Reducing Hallucination of Generative Language Models.
The mission of the Okawa Foundation is to promote and develop the field of Information and Communications Technology through awards and research grants as well as efforts to nurture researchers, engineers, and providers. It also seeks to advance diversity and the ubiquitousness of human communication and thereby contribute to the peace and prosperity of humankind.
Peng’s research goals aim to build robust and generalizable Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that lower the communication barriers and enable AI agents to become companions for humans. With these goals in mind, she has been focusing on several research topics, including creative language generation, low-resource information extraction, and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.
In addition to Peng’s recent Okawa Research Grant, she has received several awards including, but not limited to, the 2023 Google Research Scholar award, two Amazon Alexa AI Research Awards, IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, and JPMorgan Chase Outstanding Faculty Researcher Award.
We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Assistant Professor Nanyun (Violet) Peng on receiving the prestigious 2023 Okawa Research Grant and joining a select group of recipients from renowned institutions.