William Yang Wang

William Yang Wang is a computer scientist and academic. He is the Mellichamp Professor of Mind and Machine Intelligence at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Wang's research work has centered on connecting language, vision, and the empirical study of generative intelligence. He is the recipient of IEEE SPS Pierre-Simon Laplace Award and British Computer Society's Karen Spärck Jones Award.

Education and early career Wang completed his B.Eng. in Computer Science from the School of Information Engineering at Shenzhen University in 2009, followed by an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2011. From 2011 to 2012, he worked as an R. K. Mellon Presidential Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Later, he obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016.

Career From 2013 to 2016, Wang worked as a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016, he joined University of California as an assistant professor, became associate professor in 2021, and professor in 2023.

Wang is a founder and CEO of Alpha Design AI and holds the position of director of the UCSB Responsible Machine Learning Center, UCSB NLP Group, and UCSB Mind and Machine Intelligence Initiative.

Research Wang's research interests have focused on Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), investigating reasoning methods and generative models in particular. In 2017, he presented LIAR, a dataset for detecting fake news, and determined that a CNN model that combined text and meta-data performed better than deep learning models that only used text. Together with Xiong and Hoang, he used accuracy-aware reward functions and established a DeepPath learning reinforcement approach for multi-hop reasoning in graphs of knowledge. In other work based on vision-language navigation, he introduced Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching (RCM).

Wang carried out a survey to assess the NLP techniques for detecting fake news and suggested solutions to enable platforms to tackle false information.

Awards and honors 2019 – IBM Faculty Award, International Business Machines (IBM) 2020 – AI's 10 to Watch: The Future of AI Award, IEEE Computer Society 2021 – CAREER Award, National Science Foundation 2022 – Karen Spärck Jones Award, British Computer Society 2024 – Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society

Selected articles