Yejin Choi facts for kids

Yejin Choi (Hangul: 최예진; born 1977) is a top computer scientist. She works at the University of Washington. She holds a special position called the Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science. Her work helps computers understand human language and see the world like we do. This is known as natural language processing and computer vision.

Early Life and Education

Yejin Choi grew up in South Korea. She went to Seoul National University for her first college degree. She studied Computer Science there. After finishing her studies in Korea, she moved to the United States.

She then went to Cornell University to continue her education. At Cornell, she earned her PhD, which is a very high degree. She worked with Professor Claire Cardie. They focused on how computers can understand language. After getting her PhD, Dr. Choi became a professor at Stony Brook University. While there, she even created a way for computers to spot fake hotel reviews online!

What Does Yejin Choi Research?

In 2018, Dr. Choi joined the Allen Institute for AI. This is a place where scientists work on artificial intelligence. Her main goal is to teach computers to understand written language in a smart way. She became very interested in how neural networks could help with this. Neural networks are computer systems that learn like the human brain.

Building Common Sense for Computers

Dr. Choi started building a huge collection of common sense knowledge for computers. She called it the atlas of machine commonsense, or ATOMIC. This project helps computers understand everyday things. For example, it helps them know that if someone is hungry, they might want to eat.

ATOMIC works by combining different ways languages are shown inside a neural network. It does not use strict grammar rules. After ATOMIC was created, a famous language model called GPT-2 came out.

Teaching Computers to Think Smarter

In 2020, Dr. Choi received a special title, the Brett Helsel Professorship. Later, in 2023, she became the Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science. She has been using something called Commonsense Transformers (COMET). This combines new AI methods with older ones, called GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence). This approach mixes symbolic reasoning, which is like following rules, with neural networks.

Dr. Choi has also created computer models that can find unfairness in language. These models can see if language is biased against certain groups of people. For example, one study showed that female characters in movies often seem less powerful than male characters.

Dr. Choi is also an expert advisor for a French research group called Kyutai. Important people like Xavier Niel and Eric Schmidt help fund this group.

Awards and Special Recognitions

Dr. Choi has won many awards for her amazing work. Here are some of them:

• 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

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