Author | Sisi
Editor 丨 Chen Caixian
Today, the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship list is announced, and 6 Chinese scholars in the field of computer science have been elected, 4 of whom are women scientists!
They are: Chen Danqi, Fang Fei, Li Bo and Song Shuran.
At present, all four are engaged in scientific research in the field of artificial intelligence, and have stood out in many awards and activities for young researchers, and are already "old faces".
Among the four, Chen Danqi and Fang Fei graduated from Tsinghua University with bachelor's degrees, while Li Bo and Song Shuran studied at Tongji University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology respectively.
After learning the latest list of Sloan Research Awards, AI Technology Review contacted one of the winners, Fang Fei, for the first time. She commented on AI technology:
I was very surprised, when our department chair said that I was going to nominate me to apply for this award, I really didn't expect to win the award, and I was very happy to be awarded with so many great computer scholars, several of whom were my colleagues and friends, and congratulations to them!
According to Fang Fei's introduction, the selection method of the Sloan Research Award is: school nomination + scholar application system. Fang Fei's Software Research Institute of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University nominates only one person a year, and Fang Fei, as the only "seed player", is really powerful.
The Sloan Research Prize, founded in 1955, is known as the "Nobel Prize Weathervane," and many of the researchers who have won the Sloan Research Prize have continued to shine in their fields and make greater research breakthroughs after winning the award. According to statistics, 47 Sloan Prize winners later won the Nobel Prize, 17 won the Fields Medal in Mathematics, and 69 won the National Science Prize.
In addition, the Sloan Research Prize is primarily aimed at young scientists, and each winner receives a two-year total of $75,000 in prize money to support their research efforts. As Daniel L. Goroff, program director for the Sloan Prize, puts it, "Finding the brightest young people and trusting them to do what they do best is what the Sloan Research Fund is all about." ”
The 2022 Sloan Research Prize was awarded to 118 researchers, including 31 Chinese scientists (about 26.2%). Unlike previous years, this year's Sloan Research Prizes are awarded to only seven fields: Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Earth System Science and Physics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology without winners.
In the field of computer science, in addition to the above 4 female winners, there are also 2 male scientists who have won the award, namely Gu Quanquan and Henry Yuen, who work at UCLA and Columbia University.
1
Four female winners
Looking back at the Sloan Research Prize winners in the field of computer science over the past decade, we find that this year's awards have the largest number of Chinese scholars, as many as 6. In the past, the number of Chinese scientists who won awards was generally 1-2.
The list of Chinese computer scientists who have won the Sloan Research Prize over the past decade can be found below:
- 2022: Chen Danqi, Fang Fei, Song Shuran, Li Bo, Gu Quanquan, Henry Yuen
- 2021: Ma Tengyu, Kai-Wei Chang
- 2020: Yin Tat Lee
- 2019: Cai Yang, Mane Rong
- 2018: Deng Jia
- 2017: Yiren Wu, Xia Zhou
- 2016: Daniel Hsu
- 2015: Percy Liang
- 2014年：Shan Lu、Elaine Shi
- 2013: Sha Fei
In addition, women had the largest number of winners, accounting for 4 seats. This shows that more and more female researchers are brave enough to choose computer-oriented scientific research and achieve success.
So, where did these four Sloan Research Prize winners come from?
Danqi Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She attended Yali Middle School in Changsha, Hunan Province, represented China in the 20th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI 2008), won a gold medal, guaranteed Tsinghua Yao class, and graduated from Stanford University directly after graduation, under the tutelage of linguistics master Christopher Manning, and received her Ph.D. in 2018.
Photo note: Chen Danqi
In the field of artificial intelligence, Chen Danqi is the number one legend and is known as an "AI rising star" by the outside world. Her research interests include natural language processing and machine learning (especially deep learning), and she has made a number of remarkable achievements. In addition to the "CDQ Divide and Conquer Algorithm" in the informatics competition circle, which bears her name, she also made several major breakthroughs during her PhD at Stanford:
In the second year of her Ph.D. (2014), her paper "A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parser using Neural Networks" published at EMNLP 2014 was a "pioneering work" of deep learning dependency analysis methods, and the method proposed by her supervisor, Professor Christopher Manning, increased the parsing speed by 60 times while maintaining accuracy.
In 2019, her 156-page Doctoral Dissertation, Neural Reading Comprehension and Beyond, which focused on "how to make machines learn to understand human language," was uploaded thousands of times in just four days, winning the best doctoral dissertation of the Stanford Department of Computer Science that year and becoming one of the hottest dissertations in Stanford's nearly decade.
Her mentor Christopher Manning spoke highly of her as "a pioneer in solving natural language understanding problems using neural network methods."
Fang Fei, also a graduate of Tsinghua University, is now a Leonardo Assistant Professor at the Software Research Institute of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. At the end of 2020, she was selected as one of the IEEE System's "Top Ten Potential People in AI," and AI Technology Review provided an exclusive account of her experience and work.
Figure note: Fang Fei
Fang Fei entered the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University in 2007 to pursue a bachelor's degree, and after graduating in 2011, he went to the University of Southern California to pursue a doctorate in the Department of Computer Science, mainly engaged in security game research, under the tutelage of Milind Tambe, an authoritative expert in the field of security games.
Her main research content is to combine computational game theory with machine learning methods to solve practical social security and sustainable development problems, such as anti-animal poaching, protecting ferry routes, protecting Senli, reducing food waste, reducing the harm of usury, helping homeless teenagers, and so on.
In addition to Chen Danqi and Fang Fei, Li Bo, another winner of undergraduate studies in mainland universities, is also an AI academic rising star who has attracted everyone's attention in recent years. She and Fang Fei are also scientific partners, and together with Fang Fei have produced an academic tutorial on machine learning and game theory for IJCAI.
Photo note: Li Bo
According to Fang Fei, Li Bo's team has also done a lot of work to combine game theory and machine learning: "In adversarial machine learning, they will think about how to learn machine learning models from data as a Starkberg game, the protector is designing the model and parameters, and the attacker wants to make this model unable to output the correct result, so how to solve it." This is another possible way to combine. ”
Bo Li studied computer science at Tongji University in Shanghai, and later studied for a ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in the United States, where he received his Ph.D. in 2016. She then went to the University of California, Berkeley for postdoctoral research and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as an assistant professor in 2018.
Her research interests include machine learning, security, privacy, and game theory, exploring the vulnerability of machine learning systems to a variety of adversarial attacks, with the aim of developing robust, privacy-preserving, efficient, and explainable machine learning algorithms.
In 2017, her paper "Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models" (CVPR 2018), published on the safety of autonomous driving, attracted widespread attention and has now been cited more than 1,500 times. In 2020, she was successfully selected for the "MIT TR35" list.
Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08945.pdf
Another winner, Song Shuran, is a native of Beijing. She studied at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, later pursued her Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor in columbia university's department of computer science.
Picture note: Song Shuran
Her research focuses on the intersection of computer vision and robotics, with the goal of developing algorithms that enable intelligent systems to learn in their interactions with the physical world and autonomously acquire the skills to perform complex tasks and assist people in their perception and manipulation. Previously, she has received several awards including T-RO 2020 Best Paper Award, RSS 2019 Best System Paper Award, Amazon Best Operating System Paper Award 2018, and Best Paper nominations for conferences such as ICRA 2020, CVPR 2019, RSS 2019 and IROS 2018.
In 2021, her team work "FlingBot: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Manipulation for Cloth Unfolding" won the Best Systems Paper Award from the Robotics Summit CoRL. Commenting on the work, the CoRL judges gave was "For me, this paper is by far the most remarkable work on analog and real-world cloth manipulation." ”
2
Is the gender gap in computing narrowing?
In the field of computer science, the gap in the number of male and female researchers has been a common topic of discussion. In Western countries such as the United States, female researchers have long been seen as an "Underrepresented Group" (underrepresented group) that is close to ethnic minorities.
Previously, AI Technology Review had started from three female winners of the Google Doctoral Research Award to explore the views and feelings of post-90s female computer doctoral students on scientific research.
In recent years, we've seen more and more women enter science and engineering fields such as computer science that have traditionally been considered male-dominated to do research. We see that the times are changing, and the concept of the Chinese people is also improving, but whether the role of women in the computer field is also advancing with the times is still unknown.
According to Inkstone, in 2016, the proportion of female doctors in China was only 39%, while the proportion of female doctors in the United States reached 52% in the same year.
Chen Danqi also spoke out in an interview at Tsinghua Fork Institute on how to narrow the gap between men and women in the computer field:
First of all, I really want more girls to participate in these competitions or scientific research [in the field of computing], including I also want to recruit female students. This thing has not improved greatly, and it is something that has always worried me.
She said that when she was a doctoral student at Stanford, her class of CS Doctoral students had only 4 girls, a very small proportion. "The Admission committee is doing some effort to increase that percentage, but it's still low."
For how women break stereotypes, Chen Danqi combined his own experience and shared his personal views:
I hope that girls think that this is not a problem and that you don't need to think about it.
A change in a situation often requires multiple factors. In addition to the blessing of personal subjective ideas, external praise and affirmation are also the source of strength for women to move forward. The results of the 2022 Sloan Research Award are released, and 4 Chinese female scientists have been elected, and I hope that more female researchers who are struggling can be confident in the future!
Reference Links:
1.https://sloan.org/fellowships/2022-Fellows
2.http://www.360doc.com/content/17/0928/06/11698101_690745367.shtml
3.https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/V_nYWgWVcgGZlm561Ko9IA
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