Reports from the Heart of the Machine
Machine Heart Editorial Department
The Meta Scholarship Program is designed to encourage and support promising PhD students in computer science and engineering worldwide.
Recently, the results of the Meta (Facebook) Doctoral Research Fellowship Program were announced, and a number of young Chinese scholars from overseas universities were selected.
The awards recognize PhD students who have done cutting-edge research in computer science and engineering fields such as hardware/software collaborative design of AI systems, blockchain and cryptoeconomics, human-computer interaction, programming languages, and AR/VR.
Winners will receive tuition and other fees for up to two academic years, as well as a $42,000 financial aid.
This year, more than 2,300 PhD students from more than 100 universities around the world applied for the grant, and 37 were selected.
The following is the list of Chinese doctoral students who have won the prize:
AI system hardware and software co-design
Yucheng Lu, Cornell University
Lu Yu is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and is now a Ph.D. student in computer science at Cornell University, where his research interests focus on building scalable, proven machine learning systems, and his research projects involve communication compression, model compression, and decentralization. His research on decentralized learning received the ICML 2021 Distinguished Paper Honorable Mention Award.
Personal homepage: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~yucheng/
Qinyi Luo, University of Southern California
Luo Qinyi studied at Tsinghua University as an undergraduate, and is now a doctoral student majoring in computer science at the University of Southern California, under the tutelage of Dr. Qian Xuehai, whose research interests mainly focus on high-performance distributed training systems for machine learning, especially the development of new parallelization and synchronization methods.
Personal homepage: http://alchem.usc.edu/~qinyi/
Lianmin Zheng, University of California, Berkeley
Lianmin Zheng studied ACM at Shanghai Jiao Tong University as an undergraduate and is now a PhD student in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, under the tutelage of Ion Stoica and Joseph E. Gonzalez. His research interests focus on the intersection of machine learning and programming systems, particularly compilers for specific areas of accelerated and scalable deep learning. He has interned at Amazon Web Services, OctoML, and the University of Washington, where he has collaborated with Tianqi Chen, Luis Ceze, and Yida Wang.
Personal homepage: http://lmzheng.net/
AR/VR human understanding
Lucy Chai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lucy Chai, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, is now a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Phillip Isola, who has just won the Sloan Award. Lucy Chai's research focuses on image synthesis, particularly generating enhanced image forms for interactive image editing and downstream visual analysis tasks.
Personal homepage: https://people.csail.mit.edu/lrchai/
Boyang Deng, Stanford University
Boyang Deng is about to become a PhD student at Stanford University and a research scientist at Waymo Research. Previously, he also worked at Google Brain Toronto, led by Geoff Hinton. Boyang Deng's main research interest is the use of machine learning to solve problems at the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics.
Personal homepage: https://boyangdeng.com/
Yufeng Zheng, ETH Zurich
Yufeng Zheng is the son of Max Planck. First-year PhD student at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems in Zurich, a joint project of ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Her supervisors are Professor Otmar Hilliges and Professor Michael Black. Her research focuses on the areas of human-centered computer vision and graphics, with a focus on learning-based 3D modeling of faces and bodies. Prior to her PhD, she received a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and a master's degree from ETH Zurich.
Personal homepage: https://ait.ethz.ch/people/zhengyuf/
Computational Social Sciences
Serina Chang, Stanford University
Serina Chang is a PhD candidate at Stanford University under the tutelage of Jure Leskovec and Johan Ugander. She received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University. Serina Chang's research interests are in developing computational methods that simulate complex social systems, combining techniques for network science, data science, and machine learning. Her most recent work modelling COVID-19 policy response with large-scale mobility-based modeling, which uses large-scale human mobile data, has been published in Nature, KDD, and IAAI and won the KDD 2021 Best Paper Award. Governments around the world are using the findings to help develop public health policies.
Personal homepage: https://serinachang5.github.io/
Database system
Audrey Cheng, UC Berkeley
Audrey Cheng is a PhD student at RISELab at the University of California, Berkeley, under the tutelage of Ion Stoica and Natacha Crooks. The focus of the study is on transaction processing in database systems, with a greater focus on the challenge of providing stronger security and correctness assurance at large scales. Prior to Berkeley, she earned a bachelor's degree in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University.
Personal homepage: https://audreyccheng.github.io/
Renzhi Wu, Georgia Institute of Technology
Renzhi Wu is a PhD student in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is supervised by Professor Xu Chu. His research focuses on using machine learning to solve challenging data management problems such as entity matching, cardinality estimation, and truth inference. Before attending Georgia Tech, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Tsinghua University.
Personal homepage: https://wurenzhi.github.io/
Distributed systems
Jing Liu, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jing Liu is a PhD student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of Professor Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Professor Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Her research interests are in storage systems, with a focus on scale and performance. She also studies the schedulability and reliability of distributed storage systems. Before joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she earned a bachelor's degree from Nanjing University.
Personal homepage: https://jingliu.xyz/
Economics and Computing
Alexander Wei, UC Berkeley
Alexander Wei is a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was trained by Nika Hagtalab, Michael I. Jordan and Jacob Steinhardt's guidance. Interests focus on the intersection of algorithms, economics, and machine learning, particularly for developing the principles of learning, decision-making, and collaboration in complex environments. His work has been recognized by the SODA Best Student Paper Award and the INFORMS Auctions & Market Design Rothkopf Award (third place). Prior to coming to Berkeley, he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics and a master's degree in computer science from Harvard University.
Personal homepage: https://www.alexwei.org/
Human-computer interaction: social media, people and society
Pengfei Zhao, Cornell University
Pengfei Zhao is a PhD student in Cornell University's Department of Communication under the supervision of Dr. Natalie Bazarova. His research interests are the intersection of new communication technologies, interpersonal communication and well-being. Specifically, study how new communication technologies, such as smartphones and social media, affect self-disclosure, social support, relationship initiation and development, and happiness and mental health.
Personal homepage: https://cals.cornell.edu/pengfei-zhao
Internet
Qizhe Cai, Cornell University
Qizhe Cai is a Doctoral Student at Cornell University under the supervision of Rachit Agarwal. His research spans systems and networks, with a particular focus on building network systems and protocols for Terabit Ethernet. Previously, he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in computer science from Princeton University.
Personal homepage: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~qizhec/
Privacy and Data Usage
Kaiwen Sun, University of Michigan
Kaiwen Sun is a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan's School of Informatics, where his supervisors are Dr. Florian Schaub and Dr. Chris Brooks. Her research focuses on understanding and supporting children's privacy and safety needs in the context of smart home technology by designing and developing child-centered features and controls.
Profile: https://www.si.umich.edu/people/kaiwen-sun
Security & Privacy
Chen Ling, Boston University
Chen Ling is a PhD student in computer engineering at Boston University under the supervision of Professor Gianluca Stringini. She has a broad interest in the social sciences of security, privacy, and computing, with a focus on better understanding of cyber-coordinated attack behavior through multimodal, multi-platform, and hybrid approaches, and developing better resolution techniques. She earned a Master of Science in Computer Science (2019) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Urbana-Champaign, and previously a Bachelor of Arts in Art History (2015) from Tsinghua University.
Personal homepage: https://ciciling.com/
https://research.facebook.com/blog/2022/2/announcing-the-recipients-of-the-2022-meta-phd-research-fellowship/