Nanyun “Violet” Peng, an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been awarded a prestigious CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. This award will provide her with a grant of $586,000 over five years to fund her research and teaching endeavors in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.
Instead of utilizing traditional auto-regressive models for word generation, which predict words based on preceding text, Peng’s research will focus on insertion-based language models. These models emulate human writing by inserting words iteratively into existing text. The goal of this research is to enhance the flexibility, controllability, and efficiency of modern language models. This new framework has the potential to improve creative content generation, personalized communication, and user experiences with various applications of artificial intelligence.
Peng established the PLUS Lab (Peng’s Language Understanding & Synthesis Lab) upon joining the UCLA Samueli faculty in 2020. The lab is dedicated to exploring language modeling and reasoning, with a focus on advancements in language generation. In addition to her role at UCLA, Peng has served as an Amazon Visiting Academic since 2021. She has also garnered recognition through awards like the Okawa Foundation Research Award and Google Research Scholar Award. Prior to her time at UCLA, Peng held a research assistant professor position at the University of Southern California and earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
The PLUS Lab has already achieved significant milestones such as predicting epidemic-spreading events through social media analysis and developing an AI algorithm that crafts sonnets. In an upcoming study, the lab will investigate persona biases in chatbots.
Overall Peng’s work has shown significant promise in advancing our understanding and application of artificial intelligence in various fields such as natural language processing and machine learning. With this new CAREER award she will have more resources to continue pushing boundaries in this exciting area of research.
As AI continues to grow exponentially it is important for researchers like Peng who are dedicated to exploring its capabilities and limitations to receive support from institutions such as NSF so they can continue making groundbreaking discoveries that benefit society as a whole
