Ph.D. student Zhijing Jin receives the EECS Rising Star, Rising Star in Data Science, and Rising Star in Machine Learning award. Her research focuses on socially responsible NLP by causal inference.
Tübingen – Zhijing Jin, a Ph.D. in the Empirical Inference department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and at ETH Zurich, was awarded three Rising Star awards to recognize her outstanding research in Natural Language Processing, Responsible AI, and Causality.
The rising star awards recognizes outstanding Ph.D. students and postdocs in various domains of computer science. For example, the Rising Stars in EECS, originally launched at MIT in 2012 and this round hosted at Georgia Tech, is an annual award and workshop to help junior academic researchers to advance their career. The Rising Stars in Data Science, organized by the University of Chicago in collaboration with the University of California San Diego, focuses on celebrating and fast-tracking the careers of exceptional data scientists to boost their career. Lastly, the Rising Stars in Data Science is hosted by the University of Maryland in College Park, including primary presentations by the awardees (with less than 10% selection rate), and networking opportunities.
Zhijing Jin, together with the director of the EI department Bernhard Schölkopf, works on socially responsible natural language processing (NLP) by causal inference. She connects technical causal NLP work, which improves robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models, and impactful social applications, such as analyzing the cause and effect of public policies and social trends.
Previously, Zhijing graduated from the University of Hong Kong in Computer Science. Her research has been published at many NLP and AI venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, AAAI, AISTATS), and featured in MIT News, ACM TechNews, and Synced. She is actively involved in AI for social good, as the organizer of three NLP for Positive Impact Workshops (at ACL 2021, EMNLP 2022, and EMNLP 2024), Moral AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2023, and RobustML Workshop at ICLR 2021. To support the NLP research community, Zhijing organizes the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program. To foster the causality research community, she has organized the Tutorial on CausalNLP at EMNLP 2022, and served as the Publications Chair for the 1st conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR).