Yejin Choi facts for kids

Yejin Choi (Hangul: 최예진; born 1977) is a leading computer scientist. She is a professor at the University of Washington. Her work helps computers understand human language and see the world around them.

Early Life and Learning

Yejin Choi was born in South Korea in 1977. She studied Computer Science at Seoul National University. After getting her first degree, she moved to the United States. There, she continued her studies at Cornell University.

Studying Language with Computers

At Cornell, Yejin Choi focused on natural language processing. This field teaches computers to understand, interpret, and create human language. After finishing her advanced degree, she became a professor at Stony Brook University. While there, she created a special method to find fake reviews, like those for hotels.

Amazing Research and Career

In 2018, Yejin Choi joined the Allen Institute for AI. This is a place where scientists work on artificial intelligence (AI). Her goal is to help computers understand written language in a smart way. She became very interested in neural networks, which are like computer brains that can learn.

Teaching Computers Common Sense

Yejin Choi started building a huge collection of knowledge for machines. This collection is called the atlas of machine commonsense, or ATOMIC. It helps computers learn everyday facts and how things usually work. ATOMIC doesn't use strict language rules. Instead, it combines different ways of understanding language within a neural network.

In 2020, she received a special professorship. By 2023, she became the Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science. She uses something called Commonsense Transformers (COMET). This combines new AI methods with older, more traditional ways of teaching computers to think.

Making AI Fairer

Yejin Choi has also created computer models that can find unfairness in language. These models help spot biases against people from certain groups. For example, one of her studies showed that female characters in movies were often shown as less powerful than male characters.

As of 2023, Yejin Choi is also an advisor for a French research group called Kyutai. This group gets funding from famous people like Xavier Niel and Eric Schmidt.

Awards and Special Recognitions

Yejin Choi has received many important awards for her work:

• 2013 International Conference on Computer Vision Marr Prize
• 2016 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers AI One to Watch
• 2017 Facebook ParlAI Research Award
• 2018 Anita Borg Early Career Award
• 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Paper Award
• 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Outstanding Paper Award
• 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics Test-of-time Paper Award
• 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Longuet-Higgins Prize
• 2022 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award
• 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning Outstanding Paper Award
• 2022 MacArthur Fellowship
• 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics Best Paper Award