William Wang is the Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Natural Language Processing group and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science @ the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He received his Ph.D. from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has broad interests in machine learning approaches to data science, including statistical relational learning, information extraction, computational social science, speech, and vision. He has published more than 60 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals, and received best paper awards (or nominations) at ASRU 2013, CIKM 2013, and EMNLP 2015, a best reviewer award at NAACL 2015, a DARPA Young Faculty Award (Class of 2018), two IBM Faculty Awards in 2017 and 2018, a Facebook Research Award in 2018, an Adobe Research Award in 2018, and the Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in 2011.

He served as an Area Chair for NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. He is an alumnus of Columbia University, and a former research scientist intern of Yahoo! Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, and University of Southern California. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community: his microblog @王威廉 has 100,000+ followers and more than 2,000,000 views each month. His work and opinions appear at major tech media outlets such as Wired, VICE, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.

William’s interests include Natural Language Processing in the area of Information Extraction, Social Media, Language & Vision, Spoken Language Processing, Machine Learning ( Statistical Relational Learning, Deep Learning, Structure Learning, Reinforcement Learning) and Artificial Intelligence (Knowledge Representation & Reasoning and Knowledge Graphs)